Palantir: retro space-themed agency site

Palantir is a full-service design and strategy agency based in Chicago, which specialises in Drupal-powered development. It’s hard not to fall immediately in love with this site, with its charming retro space-themed illustrations, gorgeous colour palette and beautiful typography. The spacious layout is a welcome feature too, though it could be tightened up on smaller screens.

“We definitely wanted to make sure that the site wouldn’t be too heavy for mobile users,” explains Palantir’s founder and CEO George DeMet, “so we did everything that we could to optimise images, CSS and JavaScript. In our experience, responsive Drupal sites are not significantly larger than other responsive sites as long as best practices are being followed.”

That said, with a homepage size of 1MB there’s still room for improvement. HTTP requests could be reduced by concatenating CSS and JavaScript files, and the overall size of pages could be trimmed by optimising image assets.

Homepage requests/size: 26/1.00 MB mobile, 26/1.00 MB desktop

Words: Paul Lloyd. This showcase was originally published in .net magazine issue 234.

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