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.

B&O Play | Products

B&O’s website provides a sleek look to their new portable bluetooth speaker. The overall feel to the site is simple and straightforward with a soft, matted color scheme. A number of subtle features bring the website to life: a cinemagraph just below the fold, the parallax effect, and specific movements on hover. When scrolling your mouse over the image of the speaker, large circles ripple out toward the edges of the screen - making you think of the vibrating sound from a music. The round speaker at the center of the page is even reminiscent of a pebble that creates small ripples when dropped into a body of water. When hovering over more photos of the product, the image zooms in, bringing the viewer closer to the screen as the object comes to life.

B&O Play | Products

National Geographic | Yellowstone National Park

National Geographic takes a deeper look at a bear’s-eye-view of Yellowstone National Park by attaching video cameras to the animal’s collars. Aside from the awesome raw footage, this website has a number of impressive features that add to its web design. The navigation of the site is built around a map of the park: as you scroll up with your mouse, a bright yellow line moves along the trail to mark your progress. Along the left side of the screen is a thick yellow bar representing how far you’ve gone, and how much distances you have left to go. Movements and transitions on the site are smooth and fluid, and they alternate between dark and light backgrounds. When scrolling quickly, the dark/light alteration moves so fast that it feels as though the page is blinking its eyes. This emphasizes the idea that we are truly living the experience from the bear’s point of view - making it one to definitely never forget.

National Geographic

Bundy

Immediately greeted by a high-fashion cinemagraph, Bundy’s web design takes on a cool, chic look. The style of the site is slightly geometric with block-y design, and the transitions between pages are linear in movement. Impressive high definition photographs fill the background of each page, and small added features also make the design special and unique. A faded black block appears over each photograph when hovering your mouse, the way a screen or a shade would block your face from the sun. In this way, the people in the photographs are brought to life. The overall feel of the site is sleek and elegant in its web design.

Bundy

Cavalier Challenge

The Cavalier Challenge site has outstanding features that make it authentic and innovative. The homepage is colored a deep purple, immediately depicting a sense of royalty, and a dark shadowy video plays in the background. The site is built around a game that’s fun but challenging: the viewer rides horseback through a maze and is meant to gallop into gold floating orbs. Each time you run into an orb, a point is earned - similar to earning coins in a video game. You can direct your horse left or right by using the arrows on your keyboard, and the more coins you get, the better. The movements in the video and the element of control allow you to feel as though you are living through a movie. The entire experience is very 3-dimensional and exciting - but don’t be too disappointed if you don’t win. The British narrator in the background will let you know how poorly you performed every time.

Cavalier Challenge