Hot Air Pod
An independent creative agency with an unrivalled team of award winning creative-makers.
A personality-led rebuild for a creative agency, with bespoke animation and optimised video that stays fast on any device.
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Red Light #EA335A
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For Hot Air Pod, I partnered with this dynamic creative agency to transform their existing website into a vibrant, personality-rich platform. Embracing bespoke animations and smooth, seamless scrolling, the site brings their brand to life with flair and finesse. Video delivery is optimised via CDN for crisp, high-quality visuals, while responsive design, intuitive usability, and performance ensure a consistently excellent user experience across devices. Built on a modern Jamstack stack with Decap CMS, the site not only impresses creatively but is also easy for the team to update and maintain.
The Challenge
A creative agency's website has a particular problem. It is the one piece of work where the agency is both the client and the subject, and it gets scrutinised by people who make websites for a living.
Hot Air Pod have an award winning team of creative makers, so a safe, tidy, sensible site would have actively undersold them. It needed personality, movement, and a bit of nerve.
The catch is that personality is expensive in performance terms. Bespoke animation, smooth scrolling and heavy video are exactly the things that make a site feel alive and exactly the things that make it slow. Getting both is the whole challenge.
The Approach
I leaned into the character rather than hedging it. Bespoke animations and smooth, seamless scrolling give the site a sense of motion that matches how the agency actually feels to work with.
Video is delivered through a CDN, which is what makes the quality possible without the wait. It means crisp visuals that start quickly instead of a spinner and an apology.
Underneath, the site runs on a modern Jamstack stack with Decap CMS. That matters more than it sounds for an agency, because the team can update their own work as it lands rather than queuing changes with a developer. An agency site that goes stale is worse than no agency site.
The Result
A vibrant, personality-rich platform that brings the brand to life without trading away usability or speed.
It works consistently across devices, it is genuinely enjoyable to move around, and the team can keep it current themselves. For a studio whose website doubles as a portfolio, that last part is what keeps it working long after launch.
