07/2010
Gucci Timepieces is famous for marrying the fashion-forward eye of its parent house with an uncompromising view on engineering quality: under the attractive faces of their wares, tick precision mechanisms that are built to stand the test of time. Since wollzelle unveiled the first multi-award-winning new generation Gucci.com, back in 2006, we have worked in close collaboration with the brand to echo this dual commitment in their web presence.
Today, we are proud to unveil more details on the brand new site for Gucci Timepieces we launched on May 5, that takes our original design to the next step in immersive experiences and standards-compliance. By building upon rich JavaScript frameworks and leveraging the latest developments in HTML5 and CSS3, we have devised a site that intuitively delivers sound, video and data to a wide range of devices, from the office PC to the Apple iPad — and in eight languages to boot! While iPad users will appreciate using gestures to scroll through our endless gallery of watches, desk-bound visitors will appreciate the lightness and speed afforded to the site by our plugin-free architecture, CSS-based special effects and efficient image compression.
The site’s aesthetic is voluntarily subdued, and provides what we think is the perfect frame to the brand’s original designs. Wood, leather and precious metals, such as you would find in store, discretely frame the models, and the forgiving, loop-based navigation gently guides the user through the company’s timeless collections — pun intended. While seemingly similar to other wollzelle-designed Gucci properties, so as not to unsettle the visitor, this site brings some new features of its own, and has been optimised for the higher-resolution, wider screens that have recently become commonplace.
Under the site’s appealing façade beats a cutting-edge engine, that polls and arranges data on the fly for computers, iPads and smartphones, from a common pool of assets. Transparent geolocalisation helps users find stores effortlessly on a wide range of devices, while our own image-processing technologies, fluxiom and ImageGeisha, ensure illustrations are always crisp, clear, and correctly sized, without any manual intervention from the webmasters. In fact, the site was so cutting-edge, we had to “smuggle” iPads for testing from the United States to Austria, on the day they launched!
Because no company wants to mess around with code and proprietary applications, the site comes complete with a web-based backend for Gucci staff to manage store locations and report on events, as they happen. In addition to a long list of references, happenings and languages, which only keeps growing, this back-end intelligently puts over 4000 stores on the map!
We hope you take a few minutes to check out the site…