Most studios announce a new website with a carousel post and move on. The Collected Works, the independent design studio based in New York City and New Orleans, took a much longer route. After 13 years of branding, digital design, motion and creative technology work, the studio's site refresh became a chance to rethink who it is, what it wants to make more of, and where it is heading next. The new website is packed with interactive features, Easter eggs and small experiments that the team plans to keep tinkering with over time.

Rather than settling for the usual round of Instagram, LinkedIn and newsletter announcements, the team started looking for a stranger way to share it. An early idea of renting a billboard in the middle of nowhere turned into a broader conversation about odd screens in unusual places. That conversation ended with the discovery that an LED truck could be rented and driven around Manhattan for an entire day. For a studio based in New York, it felt like the perfect way to announce the new site.

The website was loaded onto the side of the truck, with animations scrolling through pages, clicking into projects and showcasing the work. For eight hours it drove through Tribeca, SoHo, Chinatown and Lower Manhattan, while passers-by stopped to film it, waved and occasionally clapped. Driftless Films documented the whole day, and the footage became a 90-second film with a bebop jazz soundtrack and narration by Scott Sena. Treating the stunt with that much cinematic seriousness only made it more ridiculous, which was exactly the point.

The launch came with its own merchandise, from custom bumper stickers to an air freshener that promises "two cities, one smell." The tongue-in-cheek graphic design extends the joke to everything the truck touched, turning a promotional stunt into a small, collectable world. For the studio, the method of announcing the work became just as interesting as the work itself. With everyone competing for attention through the same feeds and algorithms, the act of sharing a project became a creative project of its own.

And then the studio decided to make an entire video game about the truck. Out of Office is a free, multiplayer browser game in which players take the wheel of the same LED truck and race around a fictionalised New York, picking up and delivering projects from the studio's portfolio. Sooki Sesame Oil gets delivered to grocery stores, Smokeeye Hill Whiskey goes to bars, and sixteen real case studies are scattered across the city, each with its own pickup and drop-off destinations. Players race against the clock, earn money for deliveries and, now and then, launch their trucks off buildings in the process.

The team first set out to recreate Tribeca accurately, but soon realised that a compressed interpretation of Manhattan and Brooklyn, drivable from end to end in a few minutes, made for a better game. The city mixes recognisable landmarks with places tied to the studio, its clients and 13 years of studio lore. Buildings carry wheatpaste posters of past and present projects, billboards advertise fictional businesses and real clients, and graffiti and storefronts hide inside jokes that would take far too long to explain. Underneath the arcade look, the streets come from OpenStreetMap, building heights from NYC Open Data, and thousands of street trees from the city's tree census.

The playable characters are just as personal. About a year earlier, the studio had experimented with Gaussian splatting to create high-resolution 3D scans of its team members, and those scans finally found their purpose in the game. Players can choose Justin, Jose, Christian, (other) Justin, Yasmin or Jiaqi, each with their own statistics. Some of those stats rate time management and client management, which are, of course, completely irrelevant to driving a truck.

Because the game is multiplayer, players run into each other across the city, racing together, jumping off buildings or simply causing a little chaos. What started as a fairly straightforward website refresh became an eight-hour activation across Manhattan, a short film and a full video game, built in Three.js and dressed in Type Mania's Sauce and Bootzy typefaces. For The Collected Works, the larger experiment is about reconsidering how creative work gets released into the world. Instead of publishing a project and hoping people stumble across it, the studio built something people can actually spend time with, play with and, ideally, crash into another car or two.