Giga Design Studio

Fornasetti Profumi
ASMR Rooms

Immersive, sophisticated and elegantly playful

Craft - Best Use of Video or Moving Image / Honoree

Giga Design Studio

Craft - Best Use of Video or Moving Image

Honoree

We're a team of designers, artists, developers and strategists so we love the possibilities that the digital environment allows us. Building things that result in bold, playful and eye-catching experiences is what we've always strived for as a multi disciplinary group. Gabriele Donini, Creative Director

Q: Can you describe your project and the concept behind it?

A: Fornasetti Profumi ASMR Rooms is a collection of immersive sensory experiences designed around their new line of scented candles, in which time will be paused to leave room for imagination. The experience allows access to 6 rooms, one for each candle, with peculiar ASMR trigger sounds.

Q: Once you settled on your idea, what influenced your decision on the chosen technical approach?

A: We needed a strongly responsive website with very few pages. Until that moment we had never used the static site generation approach in production, but this project was the perfect opportunity to use it. As we mainly develop in Vue JS we chose Nuxt 2 and its Static Site Generation's API. It has been a good choice that we've replicated later for other projects switching in the last year from Nuxt 2 to Nuxt 3.

Q: What were some of your biggest learning and takeaways from this project?

A: It was very important for us to offer an immersive experience to the visitors on this website. The transitions between videos needed to be smooth and audio had to be present in the navigation flow. This challenge forced us to learn about the behaviors of mobile browsers (especially with iOS) with autoplay video and audio. This is the biggest takeaway that we reused in other projects later.

Q: What web technologies, approaches, tools, or resources did you use to develop this experience?

A: We worked with a lot of tools and softwares that we use on most of our projects. Starting from design where we used Figma early on for the creating moodboards and later on for the UX/UI phase. We also used Illustrator for designing the rooms' titles. As for the development, we work mainly with Visual Studio Code as code editor, VueJS and Nuxt for front-end dev, a headless approach to CMS, Github for versioning and Cloudflare as CDN for videos.

Q: How did the final product meet or exceed your expectations?

A: The result was as expected - a really calming experience to enjoy both visually and sonically, with a soft ironic touch that played out elegantly. In the end, together with our client, we watched hours and hours of candles burning while enjoying all the details of each room.

Q: How did you reach a good balance of your own creative ideas and technical capabilities with a fair representation of the client’s brand?

A: We've always worked with the idea of collaborating with the client while maintaining our own touch. As the first point is the core of our service, the second one derives from our individual personalities, taste and ambitions. In this way we've built a company culture that is shared with our collaborators, where everyone knows that the client's need comes first but at the same time that each one can completely change the value to each project.

Q: What did your initial moodboard, wireframe, or prototype look like? How did those ideas change throughout the design process?

A: We started from a very simple idea, to emulate the fireplace youtube videos: 20 hours of fireplace burning. It seemed fun but at the same time could give us a lot of room for playing with set design, storytelling and the digital interface. The client immediately loved the idea so we started working on it. There were a lot of details to be explored but as we started to prototype, we noticed we needed to play a lot more with sound.