Nikoline Werdelin
When I heard that I was to work with Nikoline Werdelin on her new website, I got very excited for two reasons. First of all Nikoline is an amazing Cartoonist with work in several Danish magazines, newspapers and published books. Secondly, Nikoline was my very first client when I first started developing websites 10 years ago. So this was my chance to build her something modern, and actually be proud to take credit for it.
About the project
Nikoline wanted a website that compiled all the different type of work that she does including her playwriting, book illustrations, published columns and cartoon series. She wanted a colourful design that highlighted her drawings across the pages.
In the initial meetings, we discussed whether or not to build a web-shop for her to sell her books. But since Nikoline is very busy, she actually preferred for her publishers to handle that via various books stores. As a sidenote she told me that she personally prefers shopping for books in physical book stores, as she finds that the feel, size and thickness of a book gets lost online.
This sparked an idea. I had been playing around with css3 transforms, transitions and perspective properties on previous projects, and I thought that maybe we could make her publications feel more tangible with the use of 3D. This would obviously have to be a progressive enhancement since older browsers would not understand most of these properties, but in these cases we could simply fall back to a list of flat images. The result was a digital bookshelf with hover and click interactions, allowing you to spin the books around in 3d space. This lets the user inspect the book in a similar way as they would have in a physical book store. The 3D books are integrated into WordPress, so that Nikoline is able to dynamically create new books in the future.