Nextdata

Next Hype is the Swiss 3D agency behind campaigns for NIKE, Adidas and Warner Bros, for music stars and agencies across Europe. What comes out of its studios is spectacular. Until 2024, everything in…

• Client: NextHype GmbH
• Built by: Orbit (Jan, Marcel)
• Period: 2024

Next Hype is the Swiss 3D agency behind campaigns for NIKE, Adidas and Warner Bros, for music stars and agencies across Europe. What comes out of its studios is spectacular. Until 2024, everything in between ran through ten chats, three clouds and a spreadsheet.

As part of a close collaboration, Next Hype 2024 sets its sights on a proprietary system with Orbit: Nextdata, a project platform that brings leads, clients, and teams together in one place. It is to carry the agency's new corporate design, function as a dashboard for both internal and external users, display ongoing projects at a glance, and allow new ones to be created in seconds. Every exchange of data, every conversation, and every payment is to take place directly within the platform. The requirements catalog is correspondingly long, drawing on the strengths of market-leading tools for planning, review, communication, and billing.

• Login for Admins, Team and Customers • One Dashboard per Role • One Channel per Project, with AI Assistance • Files as Timeline with Comments • Approval, Deadline and Budget on the Project Page • Google Meet Appointments from the Project • Notifications, optionally via Email • Wallet with Pay, Claim and Grant • Light and Dark, German and English • Hosting on Own Servers

Keep it simple.

Inwards, Nextdata aims to simplify processes; outwards, it seeks to convey a sense of exclusivity: those who work with Next Hype do not receive a ticket, but their own space. That is precisely where the difficulty lies. A huge catalog must fit into an interface that feels effortless, clearly separates the tools from one another, and reduces the project page itself to the essentials. That is why the work does not begin with screens, but with a foundation.

In late summer 2024, a library of building blocks is first created in Astro: texts with gradients, buttons with changing icons and a notification dot, input fields, selection lists, a video window, toggles for light and dark, for German and English. The dashboard is built on top of this. The ongoing project is prominently displayed at the top, followed by tiles with their own key visual and a searchable list of all projects, optionally only the accessible ones. A menu below the user's image leads with a single click to creation, users, transactions, language, and mode.

One channel instead of ten chats

The heart of Nextdata is not the task list, but the conversation. Each project gets its own channel where clients, the team, and an AI assistant write. Renderings, Reels, and PDFs are pulled directly into it instead of disappearing into a folder, and they land on a timeline with a date. Comments are attached to the file itself, and for videos, to the exact point on the timeline. Next to it is the project page with the deadline, budget, and a button for approval, below that the team with their roles and the open requests.

Users join projects as soon as their role allows it. Documents are shared and retrieved without anyone having to ask where the latest version is.

Who belongs to Next Hype is determined by the admins in the Administration: name, role, address, email, and bank details for the payout, all in a sidebar that slides over the list. A search finds any person in seconds, and a filter shows only the members if desired.

Meetings from the project

Meetings are created where the project lives. Google Meet is directly integrated: Whoever invites selects the project and the participants, the appointment appears in the channel, and as soon as the meeting is open, the button to join appears. Notifications report new projects, new files, upcoming meetings and due payments, optionally also by email. No one has to search for a link in an old message anymore.

Pay, Claim, Grant

What stands out is the Wallet. It makes any type of deposit or withdrawal accessible in any context and processes them within the platform. Based on role and distribution key, each user sees their transactions in a list and executes them according to type with «Pay», «Claim» or «Grant»: Management grants amounts, employees claim them, and customers settle their invoices. The overview is grouped by year and project, shows open and paid items, all in Swiss francs, with invoices and receipts available for download. The payout itself remains a deliberate step for the management.

New features in Figma make it possible to demonstrate real functionality directly within the prototype. This makes a difference, especially for workflows that look compact but are complex behind the scenes: ideas remain clear throughout the entire development process because you can click on them instead of describing them. Today, the Orbit Relay prototype is available, clickable page by page, from login to wallet.

Stage for your own work

If Next Hype is designed to shine, it should also shine on its own platform. The Inspiration section displays the agency's work full-screen, image by image, featuring the artist and title, and each image includes a button that leads directly to an inquiry in the chat. Alongside Nextdata, a new appearance is also being created for Next Hype itself: an extended one-pager with direct access to Nextdata, in the same corporate design as the platform.

Nextdata is fully developed: Login, Dashboard, Project channels, Meetings, Wallet and User management are ready, and Next Hype decides when the platform opens to customers. For us, this project is already one of the most defining of recent years, and we are grateful for a collaboration that had so much courage for its own solution.