Birdfeeder Design and a Good Use of Website Animation

I’m a fan of bird­feed­ers and clever prod­uct design. The Archi­tec­t’s Bird­feed­er, designed by Doug Patt Pratt, is good look­ing and an intrigu­ing engi­neer­ing solution.

architect’s birdfeeder

The key fea­ture — it ships like flat-pack fur­ni­ture but bet­ter because it goes togeth­er with­out that nasty cheap lit­tle hex wrench thing.

The ani­ma­tion of the assem­bly of the bird­feed­er on the home page of the site is brilliant.

  • It takes up only part of the page — good for those on slow con­nec­tions as you can start using the page before the ani­ma­tion fin­ish­es loading.
  • It offers infor­ma­tion about the prod­uct that can best (per­haps only) be com­mu­ni­cat­ed using animation.
  • There’s very lit­tle excess infor­ma­tion in the ani­ma­tion. Just a lit­tle sparkle toward the end of the assem­bly on the hang­ing wire. Very effec­tive in sig­nal­ing the end of the process.

I first saw this in one of my RSS feeds (can’t find it again — drat) and I’m hop­ing that I can get one. Though with the pub­lic­i­ty I would­n’t be sur­prised to find that they are sold out. I’m not sure how well it will work in the ridicu­lous amount of rain we get here in the win­ter but as a sum­mer feed­er feed­er it’s going to be aces.

About the Author

Lara Harriger

1 Comment

  1. Doug Patt

    Thanks so much for the write-up. We loved work­ing with the ani­ma­tors. They did an amaz­ing job… Just a note on the last name. It’s Patt:)

    We also worked hard to keep the thing as rain proof as pos­si­ble. We’ve got a con­tin­u­ous drip edge on the roof and a small slot where the ‘long’ and ‘short’ pieces con­verge to keep the seed con­tin­u­al­ly air­ing out.

    Thanks again!

    Best,

    Doug

Comments are closed.