Maciej Maćkowiak – storytelling website for therapist

Addiction therapist personal site. His wander through the dark forest to the open space is both his personal story and a metaphor for the therapy process he is offering.

Maciej Maćkowiak is an addiction therapy specialist running his practice online and at the office by the Baltic Sea. After living and visiting various places in the world he found peace in this nature-surrounded place. In the past, he has experienced discrimination, depression, and addiction firsthand – nature served him as a place of safety and healing. This very personal experience gave direction for the website project. Maciek has seen his need for a website coming more from a self-branding perspective need rather than a ‘conversion generator’. This opened up a perspective to focus the project on telling the story with words, images, and design. My key concept was based on the universal storytelling approach – using a hero figure as a ‘vessel’ for the listener to place himself in the center of the story. Maciej came through the dark times, and his patients can count to come through as well.I prepared on-site visuals to lead from the dark, dense textures of the deep forest onto the bright, spacious beach. In the desktop version site scrolls horizontally to evoke a sense of physically moving through the forest. The parallax effect was used as a reference to walking between the trees where one can perceive the movement of different landscape planes at different speeds. The images were taken by Krystian Lipiec.