They do their own painting

Be Light Communications sits in Corroy-le-Grand, in Walloon Brabant, and calls itself a collective of talents: visual communication, graphic design, corporate gifts and its own line of exhibition displays. Christophe Godfrind runs the place. We have been working with him for more than fifteen years, which puts the start somewhere around 2005 — the first iPhone still had two years to go.

In 2021 we built the web shop for his display brand Be Display, and wrote a piece about it at the time. Two years later belight.be itself came up: we drew it and we built it.

belight.be is a single page. You scroll through five sections — Be Light, Graphic Design, Be Display, Corporate Gifts, Contact — and with every section the background changes: cream, dusty pink, orange, teal, dark grey. Title, text and image slide up into view, and an arrow at the bottom points to the next section. All of it in French and English, with French as the default.

On the left edge sits a narrow bar, split into five blocks of colour. Those are not separate settings: the bar takes its colours from the very same fields as the sections. Click a block and you jump to that section. Add a sixth section one day and the bar grows a stripe by itself.

On load, those colours do something else first. One by one they fly in at full screen width, then fold themselves up into that little line on the left. The scroll indicator is a black dash of sixty by one pixel that slides down as you go. That is the whole thing.

In the Panel, every section is a perfectly ordinary page with four fields: text, text colour, background colour, image. That is it. No design options, no block builder, no twenty sliders you regret at midnight.

Sounds thin until you see what it buys: the colour is a field. We drew the design, they have owned the colours ever since — they can put the whole site in a different mood without calling us. At a graphic design studio that is not a risk, it is the point.

Be Display is a brand of Be Light: textile displays, Helios light boxes, Wall BeFrame and inflatable outdoor structures. Fabric that slides over an aluminium frame and stands up without tools. That site is ours too, design and build, and the brief was plain: bring back the smooth effects of our Flash years. Without Flash, obviously.

Today the shop holds eighteen products in four categories. Every product carries its own size list: width, height, depth, weight, price — and shipping per size, because a sixty-centimetre banner travels rather differently from a three-metre arch. Checkout runs on Stripe, VAT is added to the total in the basket, and every order lands in an order database in the Panel.