Lunia Blue

The Women's
Foundation

Diversity & Inclusion / Nominee

Lunia Blue

Diversity & Inclusion

Nominee

"Many of the high-end websites we see today, are more than just pages of information, they're an experience. We wanted to instill that by including as much movement and animation as we could. " Lunia Blue

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

A: The Women's Foundation approached our team for a redesign of their website. They had just recently finished a rebrand that was much bolder and more colorful than their previous look and they needed their website to reflect their new identity. The biggest change to their brand was the inclusion of more vibrant colors; metaphorically standing out. We wanted to amplify and play on that idea in the website's new design.

Q: What influenced your chosen technical approach, and how did it go beyond past methods?

A: Many of the high-end websites we see today, are more than just pages of information, they're an experience. We wanted to instill that by including as much movement and animation as we could. This also created a hurdle where the client would need to be able to easily build additional pages utilizing these animations, but without needing to code or call upon us. So, we effectively built our own back-end page builder, which we'd never done before.

Q: What web technologies, tools, and resources did you use to develop this?

A: The design was done within Sketch. We built a custom theme on WordPress. For the animated elements we used GreenSock on SVG elements and Lottie for more complex animations.

When did you experience a breakthrough or an "a-ha" moment during this project?

I think the "funnest" moment was discovering the idea to animate the colors looping within selected key words. That really was the moment that we realized we should have fun with this and expand to find out what other elements we could animate and make an experience. It really ended up pushing us to find new technologies.

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

A: During the design phase we had so many big ideas and to see that we were able to pull them all off in the final website and work across many devices really made all the preliminary planning and design work worth it. Of course hearing each client meeting after launch about how much they love the website and how easy it is for them work with is also more than what we expected.

Q: Why is this an exciting time to create new digital experiences? How does your team fit into this?

A: For us this is an exciting time because it seems that there's very little you cannot do within a website. Whether its an oddball idea in a brainstorming session or a specific request from a client — you do a little research and you'll find 9 times out of 10 there's a way to do it. On our team, we're always learning something new and so we're always looking to do something in the next website that we've never done before.