Atmosphere before templates
The site expressed the feeling of a venue through illustration, animation, characters, and navigation rather than treating the restaurant as a menu plus contact details.
Working archive / edition 02
From Flash websites to AI products.
HAAM history is not a straight line of newer tools replacing older ones. It is a record of changing ideas about what digital work can feel like, who it serves, and how it stays useful.
Archive object 001 / recovered source material
Silk Sushi Bar
Silk was an evolving Adobe Flash experience for a Tallinn sushi restaurant chain. The earliest recovered correspondence shows the colorful animated site was already live by April 2007.
Over the next four years it grew through new illustrated locations, characters, mobile concepts, menu updates, and online-ordering proposals. The archive turns Silk from a single nostalgic screenshot into a record of how one digital world adapted as the web changed around it.
Adobe Flash2007 to 2011Art directionMobile adaptation
Recovered artifacts
The project kept changing shape.
These are original project previews recovered from the email archive, presented with their dates and known production context.
February 2008
Viru location redesign
A recovered client preview for the new Viru location. Art direction and site production: Kris Haamer. Illustration: Agne Lund.
October 2009
Phone-friendly static concept
A mobile adaptation proposed while the main experience still relied on Flash, anticipating the need for a simpler parallel interface.
Archive evidence
Four years of adaptation, visible in the correspondence.
April 2007
The animated site is already live
Customer correspondence describes the new website as colorful and moving, while also noting that its fast sushi carousel made ordering difficult. The tension between atmosphere and utility was visible from the start.
February 2008
The world expands for Viru
A new city scene was art-directed for the Viru restaurant, with separate illustrated locations, characters, navigation layers, and an intentionally heightened urban mood.
October to November 2009
Mobile and ordering enter the system
Recovered files show a phone-friendly static version, a revised illustrated homepage, and work toward web-shop and ordering features.
2011
The project remains active
Menu updates and online-ordering proposals continued, showing Silk as a long-running digital environment rather than a one-off launch.
What the artifact keeps
The old technology is gone. The design questions are not.
Art direction as a system
Each restaurant location became part of a shared visual world. The archive reveals iterative collaboration across client feedback, illustration, interface design, animation, and production.
Expression had to meet utility
The same motion that made Silk memorable could make ordering harder. Later mobile and commerce concepts show the project adapting as user expectations and devices changed.
Early 2000s
The web as crafted media
HAAM began when websites were often treated as authored digital spaces rather than standardized product surfaces. Motion, sound, unusual navigation, and strong visual identities were part of the medium.
2007 to 2011
Silk Sushi Bar and the Flash-era web
Silk.ee evolved from a colorful animated restaurant experience into location-specific illustrated worlds, a phone-friendly static concept, and proposals for online ordering. Surviving correspondence shows the site was already live in April 2007 and remained active through 2011.
2014 to 2017
Cultural institutions become systems
Projects expanded from expressive sites into publishing platforms, event ecosystems, and visitor tools. The work increasingly had to balance identity with maintainability, multilingual content, and real institutional workflows.
2016 to 2018
Public stories and collective action
Film, talks, campaigns, and civic participation pushed the practice beyond conventional client websites. Digital work became a way to connect local stories with wider audiences and coordinated action.
2020s
Products, accessibility, and AI
The studio now works across research, interaction design, production code, accessibility, analytics, sustainability, and human-guided AI. The tools changed, but the central question stayed the same: what form should an idea take so people can actually use it?