By the grace of god, we have launched two sites successfully in two days

Who says we live in a chaot­ic, absurd, and mean­ing­less dream. Tim­my, Thi­a­go, and I have just launched web­sites for two tal­ent­ed, won­der­ful com­pa­nies. Let us take this oppor­tu­ni­ty to reaf­firm our stead­fast belief in the benev­o­lent hand of des­tiny. The world is a divine, pur­pose­ful place indeed.

Otis Stu­dios – Music and Sound Post Pro­duc­tion in Sydney

The team at Otis Stu­dios came to us back in May look­ing for a site that bet­ter reflect­ed who they were: tal­ent­ed, scrap­py musi­cians who weren’t afraid to try new things and get their hands dirty going in dif­fer­ent directions.

Part­ner­ing with artist Ben Tal­lon, Otis com­mis­sioned a series of illus­tra­tions that cap­tured their spir­it in paint, ink, and col­or. Our task became find­ing a way to use the web to bring the work to life in a gen­uine, thought­ful and usable way.

Much of the cre­ative process in music and oth­er forms of vis­cer­al art is about mak­ing a mess so you can make some­thing beau­ti­ful and inten­tion­al. Ideas come in and they go out. This process is lay­ered, with the mess on the bot­tom and the fin­ished prod­uct built atop of it. I want­ed to do some­thing with all of this.

Using some dif­fer­ent ani­ma­tion libraries, we cre­at­ed a site lay­out where ele­ments would move in and out, with the fin­ished work sit­ting on more artis­tic or abstract back­grounds. Using tilt.js on the home page, we sep­a­rat­ed the lay­ers of one of Ben’s illus­tra­tions and cre­at­ed an inter­est­ing per­spec­tive dis­tor­tion. The result is a site that feels alive, dynam­ic, and interesting.

The site itself is a SPA looka­like with no visu­al page reloads. The page effec­tive­ly reloads as you scroll and updates the brows­er accord­ing­ly. Every­thing is man­aged through Craft CMS, and the web­site remains easy to update and add to. Despite the high­ly con­cep­tu­al approach, we were able to main­tain a degree of usabil­i­ty in both desk­top and mobile viewports.

Only time will tell if the site will do its job and help Otis attract the cre­ative and exper­i­men­tal clients and projects well-suit­ed to their unique approach to their work. We will post updates here over time about the site’s recep­tion. Vis­it the site

Vokyl Audio – Mak­ers of the Erupt Gam­ing Headset

Dis­claimer: Vokyl is co-owned by me and my friend and past client Nick Amizich.

Vokyl, the Indiegogo dar­ling and source of much of my anx­i­ety, joy, and exis­ten­tial dread over the last sev­er­al years is final­ly mak­ing the jump from the IGG plat­form to an inde­pen­dent e‑commerce plat­form. Vokyl’s Erupt, a high-end gam­ing head­set, hit it big in 2018, rais­ing near­ly half a mil­lion dol­lars in pre­sales and com­plete­ly sell­ing out sev­er­al times.

Fer­al devel­oped all of the brand­ing for Vokyl, as well as pro­vid­ing the design direc­tion for the head­set itself. As Vokyl begins ful­fill­ing orders from its ini­tial IGG pre­sale, the next step was to cre­ate a sim­ple online ecom­merce plat­form to allow cus­tomers who missed out on the orig­i­nal pre­sale to pur­chase the headset.

From a cre­ative per­spec­tive, the same val­ues we imbued in the brand we extend­ed to the site. We want­ed some­thing clean, cool, and func­tion­al. So much of the gam­ing space is dom­i­nat­ed by dark, dra­mat­ic lay­outs, and imagery. We want­ed to pull that back and cre­ate some­thing more restrained. Our goal is to appeal to a more sophis­ti­cat­ed gamer, as well as adven­tur­ous non-gamers and gen­er­al audio enthusiasts.

The site is a fair­ly sim­ple deploy­ment. The ecom­merce por­tion is han­dled by Shopi­fy, with the editable con­tent man­aged through Craft CMS. Because this is an ecom­merce set­up, we kept the ani­ma­tions restrained, instead focus­ing on usabil­i­ty and trust.

Much of Vokyl’s growth over the last two years has been boot­strapped with a small bud­get and lots of time. As the com­pa­ny grows, we look for­ward to invest­ing and expand­ing the site into a ful­ly-fledged platform. 

Vis­it the site