How we work for creative agencies
Preproduction
Delivering a 3D website starts before the design phase. The first thing we do is get an understanding of your concept, in order to identify what challenges there are and what technologies will be involved. We want to make sure that you have realistic expectations, in order to pitch something to your client that will be as close to the finished product as possible. We’ll also help you make sure that everything is functional and avoid falling into the trap of using interesting technologies just because you can and it looks cool. Our first goal is to make content that is usable and achieves its purpose.
Design
Once we’ve helped you refine your concept, we can collaborate on the design. As you start planning the structure of your site or app, we’ll make sure that it will be accessible to all users on the devices you are targeting, both in terms of performance and being suitable for everyone regardless of any disabilities. By being as thorough as possible during the design stage, we aim to make sure that the development stage is as efficient as possible. This means getting the final design locked and approved by the client before moving into development, as last minute changes are in our experience the biggest threat to budgets.
Of course it’s never the case that a finished product exactly matches the initial design, as the design will usually change slightly during development as everyone involved gets a better and better understanding of it. We try to make sure that these changes are minimal, by comprehensively analysing the design from a multitude of perspectives ( performance, accessibility, UX, visual quality… ) so that any potential issues can be anticipated and mitigated.
Development
During the development process, we try to have a streamlined pipeline. Dev time is often a bottleneck: as you hit later stages of development, devs often have to juggle their time between tweaking parameters on behalf of designers, and fixing bugs / optimising the code.
Our CMS optimises this stage of development, as it allows 3D modellers to upload and test their models without dev intervention, and for designers to tweak colours, images and other parameters and see their changes live. This frees the developers to make sure everything works well, and implement any changes required by the client quickly and without jeopardising the quality of the final product. We are also able to have multiple versions of the same project with different parameters, allowing for easy A/B testing to find the best settings.
This makes the process much more robust and flexible, as last minute significant changes required by the client can be addressed
Testing and deploying
We build our projects with modular components, to make it easier for every feature to be easily tweaked and tested – no need to run through a whole interactive experience every time you want to experiment with the colour of the last call to action animation, you can view it standalone.
Mobile testing is often the most difficult side of testing. We use Browserstack to check the design on as many different devices as possible and make sure the code is compatible with all relevant browsers and OSes. It’s still no substitute for testing on a real device, so our CMS incorporates real time monitoring and editing capabilities: you can tweak parameters on your computer and see them reflected on your phone, allowing for easy and efficient editing. And we build in monitoring features so that we can collect data from phones running the app, enabling us to (relatively) painlessly fix bugs.
TL;DR
We work in partnership with you at every stage of a project to deliver a well crafted site / experience within your budget / timeframe, and our CMS gives you freedom to experiment with every detail while we focus on creating high quality code.