A creative agency reborn

Our new website isn’t just a lick of paint. It’s a significant shift in creative design and development, and it’s at the heart of everything that we do.

You wouldn't know it, but it’s been a long time coming. When you’ve got clients queuing up and billable hours to get done, it’s sometimes a heavy lift to get your internal projects up and running too.

After all that’s we do, bring brands to life for our clients. Our website should do the same for us... and it should be good, no, the best, right? We’re the experts. But the balance between internal-work and client-work is far weighed in the client's favour. After all, happy clients, happy team, everything else comes after that.

Any rebrand or brand refinement is by no means a quick process. It takes a clear vision on the future of the business, no matter what the business is. It’s not just a change in colors and font, it permeates through values, the team, the ethos, the roadmap, to help create something unique and memorable.

Last year the D&F team grew and the studio space was redesigned. Coupled with this we needed to refocus our business for future growth. ‘The branding didn’t align with our personality or capabilities as an agency anymore,’ comments Tony, our Creative Director, ‘so we set about creating an updated and streamlined set of assets, keeping the modern and creative style, but bringing a new energy and expression to what we do as a team.’

As the team grows and we keep pace with the trends, and the tech that impacts our work is making our skill set more varied and advanced, we need to use the website to showcase all the pieces we as a team bring, from design and digital to motion and marketing.

The new site wasn’t just about looks, oh no! It was also about showcasing our processes, technologies and the team behind it all. We pride ourselves on the creative process we bake into every project, so the sharing of behind the scenes footage shows how we craft something special for our clients.

On the development side, the team took the chance to change the tech stack, moving away from WordPress, instead using Wagtail, a CMS the team had been using and advocating for the last few years.

This more user-friendly CMS (for developer and content creator alike) has been a firm favorite of the dev team here at D&F for the last few years because of its modern programming language. It’s a light framework which makes it super fast and simple to use. ‘Plus it has high security straight out of the box and good accessibility features built in, it’s win-win’, adds Digital Director, Andrea.

Coupled with GSAP and Lenis library’s we bring the site to life by crafting high-performance animations. We implemented a custom cursor effect, revealing elements and smooth scrolling as you go down the page which gives the content a flow and movement that eases the reader through effortlessly.

When we pop open the hood we see that the Dev team have been getting busy with the set up, on Google Lighthouse the website scores 100% on performance (the site speed and the way the pages load), the accessibility (making the site good for everyone, for example the visually impaired or those using a screen reader) the SEO (how the content structure is set up) and finally, best practices (items like site security, SSL and so on).

And is just the beginning, we have big plans at Dodgems and Floss for our team of energetic and creative problem solvers. If you have a design, digital or marketing project, why not get in touch!