Celebrating Software Pioneers Utilizing an Award-Winning Website Built With No Coding
10M
People reached
Across the different channels the project ran on.
1,000
Unique visits a day
What the website draws, with the top story at 20,000.
2M
Reached by one AMA
Lou Montulli, who created the web cookie, drew over 900 comments in his Reddit session.
The client
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The conversation about digital technology is dominated by a handful of famous names, and the people who laid the foundations underneath them go largely uncredited.
Browsers, the networking protocols that move data in milliseconds, encryption that keeps communication private, the collaborative software nobody can work without — all of it came from the digital revolution’s hidden heroes. This project exists to put them back in the light.
The challengeWhat the teams actually needed
How do you properly honour people who changed the world and made your own career possible? The answer had to be big, bold and beautiful.
Challenge 01Global attention, not a niche audience
The initiative’s whole point was bringing worldwide attention to people we owe a great deal to.
Challenge 02Stories worth the subject
Each hero needed telling properly, which is a publishing problem before it is a design one.
Challenge 03Built without a development team
The site was produced as a no-code content hub rather than a custom build.
What we did
A publishing initiative that reached ten million people
Hidden Heroes went live in April 2022 with the first story, about Pattie Maes, alongside a kick-off event and an interview with the second hero, Radia Perlman, in New York.
A story at a time
Each hero gets a full story, with the top one drawing 20,000 unique visits on its own.
AMAs that travelled
The Reddit session with Lou Montulli reached two million people and over 900 comments; Philip Zimmermann’s reached 1.8 million with 600 comments; Radia Perlman’s reached 216,000.
Picked up where it counts
Mentions have come from Steven Levy and Stewart Brand, from ZDNet, and from the MIT Internet Hall of Fame.
Featured on Behance
Behance picked the site up in its UI category.
More like thisOther places we scaled product teams for growth.
What’s next