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Article in Under the Hood category.
Our Top Sites for Design Inspiration
Fueled Creative Director Rob Palmer sends out a weekly roundup of the best sites out there now, based on design and meant to entertain and…
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.
Molamil
Molamil, a digital design agency based in Copenhagen, brings us a site that is at once quirky, accessible, and professional. Scrolling through the project pages is streamlined and enjoyable, with a unique color scheme and visual accents that all the while highlight the company's emphasis on openness and collaboration. Clicking to initiate a case film or perusing the high-quality, rendered images that accompany each project are just a few of the ways this site impresses the visitor and highlights the agency’s technical skill. One of the standout features of the site is the feature image located at the top of each page, which relates to the content while also acting as the transition animation. From bottles of chocolate drink to heads in a hole, these animated images are quirky and fun while complementing the rest of the page.
Kekselias
Both an economic news source and a financial services company, Kekselias appears poised to do it all, with a chic site to match. Scrolling through each page initiates various pieces of content, from succinct text headlines to photographs. The consistent color scheme creates a cohesive brand identity while making the site more aesthetically appealing. Organization is the key to Kekselias’ success in their web design, best exemplified in the article section: a seemingly daunting collection of text is laid out with a table of contents to the left and the articles on the right, making navigation both accessible and pleasurable.
Trefecta Mobility
Trefecta’s site captures every advantage and sleek feature of their e-bikes. From video content that highlights the advanced technology to the streamlined, scrollable product page, you are able to appreciate the Trefecta bike in an entertaining manner. A chic, white background and stylish, futuristic typography highlight the innovative nature of the product. Visual content, such as the e-bikes in use and close-ups of the bikes' features, react to your cursor, making exploring the site a more interactive activity. Our favorite feature was the “Configurator”, where you can fully customize your Trefecta bike, from the color of the core to the type of tires.
Occupied
We may have hit a language barrier with the content, but that didn’t stop us from enjoying ourselves thoroughly thanks to the intriguing design features of this interactive partner site. Occupied is a TV show launched by Arte, a European television channel that provides free, cultural content across Europe. The Occupied site begins with an animated video that immediately draws the visitor in. Clicking through on the blue icon brings you to a personality quiz of sorts, where each of your answers is tracked instantly as a color on a ring, adding another level of interactivity. Real-life videos play in the background, which you can choose to switch to photos by selecting an icon in the lower right. Regardless of the language barrier, the easy to understand, click-through based game was an entertaining means of exploring the TV series, with visual content providing aid and amusement along the way.
Tennent Brown Architects
New Zealand-based architecture firm, Tennent Brown, structures their site in the same unique and innovative way as the edifices they construct. As you scroll through each page, the headline font in bold unfurls with your motion in a beautiful example of thoughtful text design. From the sepia-tones that accompany the textual content introducing each project, moving down the page brings you to full-color photographs of the building and its setting. For a final, thoughtful feature, the unfurling text appears also at the end of the page, along with an outline drawing of the structure.
Because Recollection
There are few more audio-immersive sites that are as enjoyable or purely interactive as Because Recollection, a compilation of 10 years of music from the French-based, Because.tv archives. Holding your spacebar initiates the entire activity and is the means by which you move from artist to artist. On-screen is an image, often related to the album, rendered in an innovative way: 3-D modeling, paper cutout-style, and bold photographs, to name a few. The animations move with the music, while instructions appear on-screen of how you can manipulate the sound, often by interacting with these images moving on-screen. Each artist is like it’s own game, but also allows you to listen to their music and appreciate a moment in musical history. It’s a wholly innovative way of discovering music and one of the most user-friendly, absorbing ones we’ve seen.
It's A Shape Christmas
It’s A Shape Christmas is a heartwarming website representing an even greater cause: Donating directly on the site to Key 103 Cash for Kids provides Christmas presents for disadvantaged children. It doesn’t need to be the holidays for you to appreciate the delightful elements located on each page. The site is laid out as a digital advent calendar, with custom images located behind each simple and charming day of the month. The playful color scheme keeps the site lighthearted, while the image behind each day is an appealing example of digital artwork. It is a virtual gallery of unique images rendered carefully by artists from around the world and organized in an accessible manner. There is the option to download the images as iOS wallpaper, bringing a personal and interactive element to this endearing website that succeeds in spreading holiday cheer.
World's Easiest Decision
World’s Easiest Decision, a site sponsored by The Climate Reality Project, asks the tough questions like, “Do you currently live on Earth?” And, “Do people you like live on Earth?” The humorous, if not facetious, questions don’t have a wrong answer and all lead back to the point of the site: support the cause to save the planet and sign the online petition. The minimal textual content keeps the visitor engaged while harping on humor, making the overall user experience that much more enjoyable. Playful animations and images are aesthetically appealing touches and the motion-induced background is an additional feature we couldn’t miss. Another appealing element is the sounds and animations cued by hovering over either answer.
