Every week at Fueled, our London-based Creative Director, Rob Palmer, shares a handful of inspirational websites with our teams in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. This weekly email acts as a virtual water cooler, encouraging us to congregate across time zones and discuss what brands and blogs are doing to push new trends in web design.

Wonderland

Wonderland is a website designed to give its viewer a cool customer experience, and a number of features on the site stand out as innovative and creative. The cursor, for example, is not the usual arrow that most websites use; rather, it is a small red dot that acts as a bullseye to capture your attention. High def photos are used in the background and the transition between pages is smooth and fluid.

Wonderland

Checkland Kindleysides

Checkland Kindleysides is a design agency specializing in the art of brand storytelling. The homepage greets its viewer with the image of an eye that takes up the entire screen. In this way, you are immediately brought close up to the website and to the product. At the bottom of the page, there are a number of different icons, each representative of a different service that Checkland Kindleysides has to offer. Though each one is unique, they all look somewhat like an unusually shaped molecule, and when hovering your cursor, they are animated to take on different forms.

Checkland Kindleysides

Nikos Koulis

Nikos Koulis jewelry design is elegant and the overall feel of the site is polished and sophisticated. By using soft greys and whites, the color scheme on the page is similar to that of his silver and diamond jewelry. The Nikos Koulis logo is slender and minimalist in design, and its geometric structure mimics the shape of his jewelry collection. Every detail is refined and perfected in order to mirror the logo - all the way down to the animation of the hamburger menu and the sidebar navigation. The website is one page that uses infinite scroll, giving the site a fluid feeling of continuity.

Nikos Koulis

Maeva Barriere

Designed to inspire your culinary skills, Maeva Barriere is a site for creating edible art. The way that much of the text appears on the screen is linear in movement, as are the page transitions. The navigation of the site is unique and innovative: images are staggered vertically creating a zigzag that your eye is meant to follow from top to bottom. When scrolling down on the page, the images then appear to pop up. In the background are animated images of each edible plant, and the parallax effect enhances a sense of dimension. On the following pages, the background begins white with black text, but after scrolling down, everything is inverted. You are reminded of a photograph’s negative, or a yin and yang, or simply just a light switch being turned on and off.

Maeva Barriere

Plastic

The homepage of Plastic immediately draws in its viewer. The background is all black with speckles of bright colors, reminiscent of outer space, or some alternate galaxy. As you hover your cursor over the bold white lettering at the center of the page, the colorful speckles move subtly, giving the page an element of 3-dimensional movement. The navigation bar sits on the right side of the screen to highlight where you are on the site map, and each page is a different vivid color. Page transitions move from bottom to top, reminding the viewer of window shades that are being lifted - ultimately, to reveal more on the site.

Plastic

Visit Humboldt

Visit Humboldt has taken on an Alice in Wonderland theme for their website - which isn’t too far off, considering Humboldt is one of the greatest places to explore on the west coast. With fun, inspiring music playing in the background, the homepage plays a video that shows the true diversity of Humboldt County - from lush green and earthy woodlands to ocean breeze and vast beachfronts. The icon that sits in the center of the page is a slice from a tree trunk, emphasizing Humboldt’s biggest tourist attraction: The Redwood Forest. The coolest part about this site is the way you can set up a customized itinerary for your vacation there. After choosing what kind of getaway you’re looking to have, a video plays where your cursor becomes a marker. Anytime you see a location that catches your eye, all you have to do is drop a pin, and voila, it’s added to your itinerary. Overall, Visit Humboldt is an impressively interactive site that encourages its viewers to enjoy the outdoorsy word of the NorCal coast.

Visit Humboldt