Cargo Collective: A stunning web publisher for eye-popping content

There’s a whole lot of content on the internet, and much of it doesn’t look all that good. But if you visit the Cargo Collective, like we did, you’ll see just how amazing the web can look when designers empower fellow creatives.

“Cargo is a web publishing system meant for creative professionals,” explains Folkert Gorter, co-founder of Cargo, and an interaction designer originally from Holland. “You can say it’s a CMS, as well as a system that provides web site templates that are starting points for designers to create their own web site. It’s mainly used by people who have a lot of visual content to publish, like designers, photographers, architects, stuff like that, though it’s transitioning more and more toward more textual as well. If you think about it, WordPress is mostly text-oriented publishing, and say, something like Tumblr is a lot more visual, like pictures. Cargo is sort of in between those, where we are truly multimedia: we put a lot of emphasis on the combination of text and image.”

Cargo isn’t a CMS for everyone—but those with eye-popping content and some knowledge of CSS can create sites that look better than almost everything else on the web. Amid their stylish design and sophisticated programming, Gorter and co-founder Josh Pangell have discovered some tricks to making HTML look fantastic. “‘Float left’, the CSS rule, is like our biggest thing,” says Gorter. “We float everything left, and it becomes liquid instantly,” adapting to whatever size screen it’s on.

How does Cargo set itself apart from a web dominated by big guns like WordPress? “L-O-V-E,” says Gorter. “We make no compromises. We have design skill, and we have programming skill, and we don’t f-ck around. We really design it in the best way possible and we don’t compromise.”

More info:
Cargo Collective web site: http://cargocollective.com/
Cargo Collective on Twitter: http://twitter.com/cargocollective
Space Collective web site: http://spacecollective.org/