James Andrew Smith

I had the opportunity to collaborate with BBC Studios on a project to create a new website for Baby Cow Productions.

Baby Cow are responsible for iconic titles such as Alan Partridge, The Mighty Boosh, and Gavin & Stacey.

I worked closely with the BBC’s design team to ensure the technical feasibility of their ideas regarding page transitions and animations. It was important to strike a balance between engaging visuals and effective user experience.

To provide the client with easy content management capabilities, I built the website using WordPress. This allowed them to easily administrate and update content while also providing flexibility to add additional WordPress packages in the CMS according to their technical needs.

I visually streamlined the CMS admin and used Advanced Custom Fields to organise and present content fields in the most logical and user-friendly manner possible.

The most challenging aspect of the project was implementing the page transitions on the front-end. This involved synchronising the existing and next pages during transitions and preloading images from the upcoming page.

To achieve this effect, I used the JavaScript library barba.js for page transitions. Additionally, I created custom PHP queries to identify and preload images for the next page.