Swirleez
A healthy and sweet frozen treat 🍭
Background
Swirleez is a family owned and operated frozen yogurt shop, located in the centre of downtown Barrie, Ontario. They’ve built a strong reputation for their vast array of treats, ranging from frozen yogurt, to crepes, to their signature S’wafflez, and everything in between. Creating unique experiences is at the core of the Swirleez brand. Every year they have come out with one stellar new treat after another.
Project
The chance to work with Swirleez was an opportunity that we could not give up. We loved the idea of working with them so much so that we actually approached them. Our strategy was a simple one. Create a fully custom WordPress website for Swirleez so that they have a website unique to them. We wanted the site to be fun and exciting, something special and unlike any other site we’ve seen. This is that process.
A physics engine
When a user scrolls through the Swirleez website, they will quickly notice that the foam-like circles on the page are interacting with the user. Based on the velocity the user scrolls through the page, the circles will move accordingly. To take this even further, we coded the circles to be aware of each other! This meant we could track collisions. This effect creates a buttery-smooth animation, and makes it quite addicting to just scroll up and down and watch the circles interact.
The products needed to be front and centre
Each menu item has a lot of ingredients and price points, but what sells a product is how it looks. Customers need to see the food to get that itch, that craving, that desire to go and get one. We decided to make a separate page for each menu category. Below is an example of the Waffles category. From here, you are greeted with a gorgeous oversized photo of the product to really wet your appetite.
At the end of the page we give the user the ability to view the next product category for easy navigation. Finally, we continued to make the website unique by utilizing the physics engine to render the circles just before the footer.


When the user scrolls up or down, the circles will move and interact with each other based on the velocity of the scroll.

To unify the design further and to continue with the usage of spheres, we made the menu flyout as a sphere.


Results
Result #1
Fun, visual experience
When a user goes to the site, they quickly see the visual effects in action. We optimized the code in such a way that the animations will be buttery smooth, even on mobile devices. If you’re curious, we did this by making it so there are actually only ever two rows of bubbles, and then, based on where a user is on the page, those bubbles will move there. This creates the illusion that there are bubbles after every section, when in reality it’s just the two!
Result #2
A modern website
Swirleez now has a modern website, on a platform that is scalable. They are able to easily add new features, such as the ability to sell products through Shopify. The website is now fun, inviting and perfectly matches their brand colours and fonts.