We’ve recently launched a new website for Bump to Box, a company that specialises in luxury gift boxes for mums to be. Mums often get forgotten in the excitement of a new baby coming, and they’re aiming to change that with a range of thoughtful products to suit all budgets.
We've recently built a microsite for design consultancy Dragon Rouge highlighting some of their work and current thinking in the healthcare sector. The site's cms was built using Laravel, whilst the frontend makes use of fullpage.js. You can check out the site here.
We've recently added a Snow Reports section to the Tignes Spirit/Val Spirit Rentals websites. This new area of the site allows a variety of contributers to post updates on the snow conditions. The backend of the system is fully responsive and built in Laravel, it downsamples any images before uploading with the aim being that the contributors will be able to write and upload reports whilst out on the slopes. You can check out the snow report for Tignes here, the conditions seem amazing this winter!
Here are a couple of animated gifs that formed part of a series which we've recently been working on for an agency client. The finished animations were to be embedded within html marketing emails.
We’ve just launched a new website for Semantic Evolution, a company who specialise in extracting and structuring data from unstructured documents. Conveying the flexibility and scope of their system was a difficult proposition which we solved by using an interactive diagram showing the data flow from unstructured to structured. Getting this to work well on mobile was challenging, but the end result was well worth the effort.
We’ve recently built a new home for hundreds of stunning images by photographer Lee Mawdsley. Lee wanted a carousel element on the homepage, which is usually a bit of a UX no-no. To mitigate this the images are lazy-loaded and though there's a predefined order, it starts in a random place each time. As a result of this, every time I load the site up, I do find myself spending way too long way watching them animate through! When you have really great content maybe they’re not such a bad idea after all. If you want to take a look, you can check the site out here.
We've built up several sets of html5 banners for ad agency Scorch for their client Twinings. The banners are based on Twinings' amazing paper-craft stop motion ads from 2016 that are well worth a watch. Though slightly less ambitious the banners are pretty cool nonetheless, heres a quick peak.
We've just built and launched a (very!) small responsive website for Brand in Hand. The site design was by Mosley Design, and you can view the website here.
We’ve recently made a few subtle tweaks to the Tignes Spirit Rentals site to improve a couple of user interactions. Firstly we needed to find a way to encourage users to upgrade their existing package, and secondly try to upsell items like Lift Passes and Ski Lessons, which many people don’t know they can provide.
We tackled the first one by adding a prompt to the Add package screen, reminding the user that for just £X they could upgrade to better equipment… and a lot of people have done the upgrade.
For the upselling, we added these items into the booking flow, whereas previously they’d been side modules on the Webcams page (the most popular page on the site). This change has worked really well as theres been a lot more interest in them, certainly more than was expected!
We've recently built and launched a site for beauty/lifestyle brand Vanderohe. The new website showcases their upcoming range of natural and organic skincare products. The site design was done in conjunction with Mosley Design. I particularly like the ingredients page, its amazing to see the care and attention to detail that's gone into the product.
Decmber is the time of the year for seasonal e-greetings, and this is a nice one we've done for architects Patel Taylor, offering a teaser glimpse of their new development at London Dock.
We've recently designed a one page website for a leisure development company for brand design consultants Inaria design. The site features some nice interactive elements and was designed to highlight the luxury projects they have been involved with over the years. You can check it out here.
We've just launched a very cool microbe interactive as part of ico design's rebuild of the microbiologyonline.org.uk website. The interactive is mostly built using the html5 canvas and the brilliant createJS, which never ceases to amaze in terms of what you can achieve with it. Click here to explore the secret world of microbes, both good and bad.
We've recently redesigned the website of architects Delvendahl Martin. The primary goal was to make the site work responsively, without changing too much of the underlying cms structure.
We paid particular attention to the project galleries, moving away from a blind click through system to something that presents the work in a much more user friendly way.
We’ve just launched a new responsive website for West Country Horse Transport, a company who provide horsebox hire to move your four-legged friend the length and breadth of the country. They're lovely people to work with and you can check out the new site here.
We've designed a logotype for tree care specialists Summit Tree Care, which you can see in all its glory below.
Just in time for the winter season, the Tignes Spirit Rentals site has been given a fresh new look, and is now built responsively, so you can book your snowboarding kit from half way up the mountain!
The rebuild followed extensive wireframing and UX work to find the best way of exploring and booking the equipment on desktop and touchscreen devices.
TSR carry a lot of high end equipment that you typically wouldn't be able to rent, so if you're planning a holiday in Tignes they're well worth checking out.
Grab your towel and get ready for adventure! We've recoded our classic Hitchhikers game so it now works on mobile.... erm sort of!
Originally built eons ago for ico design (as part of a job promoting a Hitchhikers exhibition) this new version is coded from the ground up in create.js. The particular problem converting this game from flash is that it consists of 42 mini games, creating a large asset overhead, particularly if you need them big enough to look good on desktop.
Some of the 42 games have had to be culled to keep the file size down, theres 2 different versions, the Full version (fast phone and questions about the book), and the Lite version (some animation stripped out and no questions) useful if you have a mobile that's particularly slow.
We'll post some more on this another time so consider it a work in progress till then!
We've just launched a new version of hannahteare.com. The site is now fully responsive and shows the work off to maximum effect as well as allowing busy Art Directors to navigate through her portfolio quickly and easily.... and its always nice when clients get into the hoppermagic vibe!
We've recently been doing some updates to the website for The Table Cafe, a lovely restaurant located on London's South Bank serving up delicious food using quality British ingredients. Among other minor tweaks there is now a new What's on Section that acts as a listing for all their upcoming and past events.
The new Hoppermagic site is finally live, and to celebrate we've constructed an army of giant origami rabbits to let loose on the city of London. Origami is a craft that doesn't scale up particularly well, each of these guys were constructed using 4 x A1 sheets of 275gsm paper, requiring about 2 hours of back breaking taping and folding as well as a few sneaky cardboard supports to aid stability. We're indebted to Mica's Paper Craft Channel for the YouTube tutorial detailing the folding pattern. The rabbits will hopefully be menacing their way across London in the coming months.
Hoppermagic has provided the design skills for the Naked Itchy Feet website, a travel blog for Kelvin Luck's trip around the world in 2013-2014. The site is quite experimental, exploring ways of using maps and geotagged content within the traditional structure of a travel blog.
Visit Naked Itchy Feet
We've recently added a new interactive template to The Ultimate Travel Company's website. The Top 10 template uses Google maps to show Ultimate Travel's top sights, locations and experiences within a particular country. Its a handy tool as it gives a good indication of where things are positioned relative to one another so you can cram as much into your journey as possible.
We've just updated the website for yacht design company Andrew Winch Designs. The original site was produced some 5 years ago and featured several flash interactives that of course don't render on today's tablets and mobiles. AWD wished to stick with the current site design, so the interactives were reprogrammed in jQuery and the CMS modified to provide an accessible experience on desktop and touch that's near identical to the original flash incarnation.
Visit Andrew Winch Designs
Hoppermagic provided the design and the icons for Kelvin Luck's Business of Bond infographic, which tells the story of the Bond films from a financial perspective. A couple of icons are a bit tenuous, (we were a little pushed for time!) and there is no clear convention as to what the icon relates to, but they make a nice set. Can you match each Bond film to the icon? Can you even remember what Quantum of Solace was about?
View The Business of Bond
A small but perfectly formed website for ex England cricketer Ed Giddins, showcasing his talents as an After Dinner Speaker, Event Host and Auctioneer. Hoppermagic were responsible for the design and build of the website, we're particularly pleased with the media queries which mean its as useful on a mobile as it is on a laptop.
Visit edgiddins.com
The newly redesigned Ultimate Travel Company website has recently gone live. Hoppermagic handled the front and backend development work as their existing site was restructured into something more modern and fresh. We also came up with an IA that enabled them to present their luxury holidays in a much more organised and user friendly fashion. If you're in need of a holiday, and with the British Summer who isnt, they're well worth a look.
Luxury holidays at The Ultimate Travel Company
We've just redesigned the website for Conde Nast Traveller's Fashion & Beauty Director Fiona Lintott. The brief was to keep things as simple as possible and present the work in a way that's easy to view and quick to navigate. The site has a custom built CMS using Kohana which makes updating it really simple.
fionalintott.com
We were approached by Luck Laboratories to create a Flash animation of ice melting around a text field. We realised the best course of action was to photograph ice cubes as they melted (using a hair dryer to speed things up!) to work out what the edge between the ice block and the puddle should look like. We then retouched these images in Photoshop to create a single ice block.
The finished effect can be seen below, there's a bit of a disparity between the size of the block and the puddle it produces, but the effect works pretty well.
View melting effect
We've recently produced an animation for a new sustainable energy website. When you shop through Do the Bright Thing they'll install a set of solar panels to offset the energy that was used to create the products you buy. The video was designed to show how simple the process is and how it could make a big difference if everyone shopped this way.
View the animation
Late last year Los Angeles rabbit rescue centre RabbitMatch got in touch with us about redesigning their website. Rabbit welfare is something that's close to our heart, and we were pleased to produce the work as a charitable donation to RabbitMatch.
Visually the site is a big improvement on the previous version, its also been restructured so its easier to find and access the information you want. We also added a 'Rabbits for Adoption' section that should make it easier for the bunnies to find new homes. The site is built using Wordpress.
RabbitMatch do a really great job, rabbits make ideal indoor pets, so if you're in L.A and thinking about a pet check out their site!
One of the things we've been working very hard on lately is The Poker Stock Market website and identity, and today the site went live! It's an interesting concept, allowing people to buy shares in a team of poker professionals. We're looking forward to seeing how things pan out with this one and hopefully seeing the graph on the homepage start to rise.
Right on cue for the 2011-2012 Winter season, the new Tignes Spirit Rentals website has gone live.
TSR have been renting out snowboard and ski equipment for a while now and the addition of a dedicated website should make the booking process run even more smoothly, form the perspectives of both customers and the company.
If you're planning winter holiday in Tignes, check out the website as they have some really good kit for hire and some pretty good offers :)
Tignes Spirit Rentals
This amazing artwork by Belgian artist ROA is in threat of being removed. A Hackney Council statement reads:"...whilst it is not the council's position to make a judgment call on whether graffiti is art or not, our task is to keep Hackney's streets clean."I'm always amused when people talk about cleaning up the streets, I immediately think of Dirty Harry or Robocop, but jokes aside, the Rabbit is a thing of beauty in a not entirely attractive part of the world, something picked up on in this Guardian Article.There's a petition up and running to save the Rabbit, and art lovers are being encouraged to use the #savetherabbit Twitter hash tag. Hopefully common sense will prevail.
Exciting news, the iPap celebrity spotter, our first foray into iPhone development, is now available for download on the App Store. The app is an extension of the iPap.me website, allowing users to add their celebrity spots and images whilst they're out and about. They can also browse the map and feed, to find out where their favourite celebrities are and what they're are up to.
Just added some new images to the website of Tatler's Hannah Teare. There's a few shoots we particularly like, but the Bigger Splash one really stands out for the excellent lighting and other such technical things :)
We've spent an age retouching celeb watcher and blogger extraordinaire Zoe Griffin into a cocktail glass to create an incrediably sparkley newsletter. Visit zoegriffin.co.uk to sign up for it, and if you like what you see why not vote for Zoe in the Cosmo blog awards in the Celebrity category.
We've been hard at work rolling out some updates to our celebrity spotting site iPap. Users can now add images of any celebrities they've spotted, as well as giving the gossip on what they're up to. On the picture front we've hit the giddy (and slightly comical) heights of Vanessa Feltz in a boat, though its fair to say we're hoping to catch some bigger fish....
ipap.me is a celebrity spotting website, and after a good 5 months of work we've finally opened it up to the general public. iPap's mission is to record where celebrities are, and what they're up to. Users go to ipap.me on their mobile and record an iPap whenever they see someone famous. The mobile website, which is optimised for iPhone and Android devices, uses geolocation methods to record the position of the iPap, which is then displayed on the website and mobile site, as well as posted to the twitter account @ipapme. Of course if users don't have one of these devices they're still able to post iPaps through the website.
One of the key aspects of the site is that its not just about the celebrities, its about the people doing the spotting as well, so there's a scoring system and various top 10 lists. You also score more points if somebody else spots the same celeb at the same location within a couple of hours of your spot.
Its very early days for the site, but initial feedback has been great and as we continue development hopefully the user base will begin to expand, which is crucial if the project is to realise its potential.
We've been hard at work on the identity and naming for sharify. Devised by Luck laboratories, sharify is a .swc library that can be easily incorporated into Adobe AIR projects thereby allowing developers to charge money for their applications.
The product was originally to be named shAIR but Adobe were unhappy about this as they 'own' the AIR combination of letters in the flash ecosystem... and after being enthusiastic about our product and offering all sorts of help (which never materialised), a few months later they decided to become a direct competitor themselves.
