Helter Skelter is one of the most fun projects we’ve worked on in my time at a dozen eggs. The client, Loughborough duo Helena and Tor, run a circus entertainment company that offer loads of different acts, for a variety of events, with a choice of themes. They came to us for branding and a website, and the design team were delighted with their moodboard feedback. They wanted a brand that communicated how quirky and fun they are. It was really fun to see some of the things the team (Michelle, Jo, and Beth) came up with. A personal favourite was Michelle’s illustration of a fish coming out of a trumpet.

I really like the result of the branding process. I love the contrast between the bright colours and the black and white illustrations and serif logo. Jo’s website designs carried across this brand work, and Michelle and I also got to play with some animations.

We used a variety of animation techniques to bring some life to the homepage. Michelle initially created the animations in After Effects, animating the position of the mask and hat, and the rotation of the mermaid tail. When we were happy with how they looked, I then converted them into CSS keyframe animations. We also used this method to animate a child riding down the helter skelter on the contact page.

For the Ferris wheel, I used an image sprite which contained an illustration for each frame of the animation at 24fps. This gave it a slightly-jerky and cinematic feel, while also keeping the filesize down.

You can read more about the branding and illustrations we created for Helter Skelter on the a dozen eggs website.