With background video, Squatch Creative could ride web design’s next big trend

Web design is fast adopting a mobile-friendly development focus, as more online traffic is taking place on smartphones and tablets. That has mostly meant simpler design features to boost load time and a viewing experience optimized for small screens.
Now, Wilmington-based design firm Squatch Creative is making a reputation for itself by marrying mobile-minded design with increasingly ravenous demand for online video.
If you look at the Squatch homepage or, say, the site for celebrated Market Street restaurant La Fia, which Squatch designed, you might see something new: background video playing on a loop to help give a brand … feeling.
It’s a trend you’ll start seeing on more landing pages — PayPal earned some attention for its new homepage earlier this year. It just might be the next shiny design treatment to follow mobile-first, like parallax scrolling was in 2013.
“A lot more information can be conveyed through video versus still imagery,” said Evan Lober, who cofounded Squatch last July. “Video just provides a more human element.”
So why are video backgrounds suddenly in vogue?
“[Better] Internet speeds and advances in development [and] compressions now allow for video as background,” said Lober. For now, most are using smaller, highly-compressed clips, but the expectation is that fuller-length, higher-definition video isn’t far away.
Sites with video backgrounds may be a new trend, but it’s not all Squatch does. It’s a creative firm that is building out a client list by servicing design and web work more generally. Squatch is currently working on a project with prolific Delaware-based construction firm Buccini/Pollin.
Lober, part of a team of five, is based in the 424 Building on Wilmington’s North Market Street, next to World Cafe Live and across from La Fia. Lober’s fellow partners are Brooklyn-based art director Marcus Price, who is their lone team member not based in Delaware, lead developer Randy Neil and business development lead Michael Gracie. Michael Pfeifer, a UDel graduate like Lober, is director of photography.
“[Basing our business in] Delaware is great for all the reasons you have heard in the past — proximity to major markets, taxation, Delaware business law,” said Lober. “When we execute well locally our business and portfolio grows via word of mouth.”