We are the digital agency
crafting brand experiences
for the modern audience.
We are Fame Foundry.

See our work. Read the Fame Foundry magazine.

We love our clients.

Fame Foundry seeks out bold brands that wish to engage their public in sincere, evocative ways.


WorkWeb DesignSportsEvents

Platforms for racing in the 21st century.

Fame Foundry puts the racing experience in front of millions of fans, steering motorsports to the modern age.

“Fame Foundry created something never seen before, allowing members to interact in new ways and providing them a central location to call their own. It also provides more value to our sponsors than we have ever had before.”

—Ryan Newman

Technology on the track.

Providing more than just web software, our management systems enhance and reinforce a variety of services by different racing organizations which work to evolve the speed, efficiency, and safety measures, aiding their process from lab to checkered flag.

WorkWeb DesignRetail

Setting the pace across 44 states.

With over 1100 locations, thousands of products, and millions of transactions, Shoe Show creates a substantial retail footprint in shoe sales.

The sole of superior choice.

With over 1100 locations, thousands of products, and millions of transactions, Shoe Show creates a substantial retail footprint in shoe sales.

WorkWeb DesignRetail

The contemporary online pharmacy.

Medichest sets a new standard, bringing the boutique experience to the drug store.

Integrated & Automated Marketing System

All the extensive opportunities for public engagement are made easily definable and effortlessly automated.

Scheduled promotions, sales, and campaigns, all precisely targeted for specific demographics within the whole of the Medichest audience.

WorkWeb DesignSocial

Home Design & Decor Magazine offers readers superior content on designer home trends on any device.


  • By selectively curating the very best from their individual markets, each localized catalog comes to exhibit the trending, pertinent visual flavors specific to each region.


  • Beside the swaths of inspirational home photography spreads, Home Design & Decor provides exhaustive articles and advice by proven professionals in home design.


  • The art of home ingenuity always dances between the timeless and the experimental. The very best in these intersecting principles offer consistent sources of modern innovation.

WorkWeb DesignSocial

  • Post a need on behalf of yourself, a family member or your community group, whether you need volunteers or funds to support your cause.


  • Search by location, expertise and date, and connect with people in your very own community who need your time and talents.


  • Start your own Neighborhood or Group Page and create a virtual hub where you can connect and converse about the things that matter most to you.

775 Boost email open rates by 152 percent

Use your customers’ behavior to your advantage.

702 Vintage brand management from sour grapes

Social media gives smart brands the opportunity to turn an unhappy customer into an advocate for life.

774 Feelings are viral

Feelings are the key to fueling likes, comments and shares.

773 Don’t be so impressed by impressions

Ad impressions are a frequently cited metric in the world of online advertising. But do they really matter?

September 2011
By The Craftsman

Finding Website Design Inspiration in Nature

The secrets to powerful website design are all around you.
Read the article

Finding Website Design Inspiration in Nature

nature-article Website design inspiration can be found in any number of places, from art galleries and instruction books to online showcases and portfolios, just to name a few. But to tap into one of the most profound and limitless sources of timeless design ideas, you must put down the books, step away from the keyboard and walk outside. For any and every aspect of design, nature is the true master. After all, what human artist could surpass nature in its ability to mix colors, create textures, evoke emotion and balance form and function?

Color

summer The challenge of striking the right balance of color and tone can test the mettle of even the most seasoned designer. There are many resources online that can help you experiment with color and try out palettes, but there is no better source to guide you than nature. Nature has an uncanny ability to blend just the right tones and hues to achieve visual harmony. In the world around you, you can find a perfectly balanced palette to match every emotion, every mood and every purpose. Drawing upon nature’s palettes can make your website just as unique as the landscape from which it takes its inspiration, providing a distinctive feel that will be a welcome breath of fresh air in comparison to the cold corporate websites your customers have grown tired of. One of the best ways to use the colors found in nature is to create a palette based on a photograph. There are several web-based tools that allow you to do this. Simply upload an image, and these tools will automatically generate a palette that you can apply in your design. Resources: PHOTOCOPA: http://www.colourlovers.com/photocopa Color Hunter: http://www.colorhunter.com/ Image to Color Palette Generator: http://www.cssdrive.com/imagepalette/

Texture

webirca Nearly all textures found on the Web are designed to emulate real textures found in nature. When implemented in conjunction with typography, color and lighting, these textures create a browsing environment that feels more organic and engaging to the end user. Textures also play a key role in interface design. Applying natural textures to page components such as buttons, sliders and forms can make them feel more tactile and provide important visual cues to guide users as they interact with your site, especially on touch-based platforms. Resources: Bittbox: http://www.bittbox.com/category/freebies Zen Textures: http://zentextures.com Image*After: http://www.imageafter.com/textures.php

Mood

bing Nature can provide inspiration for any mood or mindset your web design strives to create. When it comes to tone and emotion, nature covers the full spectrum. Fog and rain reflect sorrow or melancholy. Bright sun and blue skies convey joy, hope and purity. Wide-open landscapes and the infinite cosmos evoke a sense of adventure and excitement. And what says tranquility and peace better than the white sandy beaches of a Caribbean island? Using natural scenery is an effective way to create an aura for your website. By employing large-scale images of beautiful landscapes as a focal point, you grab the user’s attention and immediately engage them emotionally. As soon as a visitor lands on your site, they step into an enticing virtual environment that compels them to explore deeper.

Utility

packaging There’s much more to good website design than finding the right combination of colors and textures. At its best, website design solves problems – finding the most effective ways to communicate a mission, to capture the essence of a brand, to tap into the psyche of a customer and to create want and desire. Nature is unmatched in its capacity for solving problems. Nature designs things to work efficiently within the many particular nuances of the surrounding environment. Everything found in nature – from the tallest mountain to the tiniest microscopic organism – is designed in a specific way to accomplish a specific goal. To attract or to blend in. To shelter, to protect or to evade. The same rules apply to good web design: every individual element must be planned and implemented to serve a specific purpose. In this way, nature serves as inspiration not only to designers but to architects and engineers as well.

Gallery of websites inspired by nature

huxleyprairiefest.com

prairie-fest

blueridgeparkway.org

blue-ridge

eastpoint.org

eastpoint

enneasportswear.com

ennea

garnierbody.com.br

garnier

helpyourhabitat.org

habitat

imaginamos.com

imaginamos

raisetheroofproductions.com

raise-roof

sproutlet.io

sproutlet

swissside.com

swissside

traderjoes.com

traderjoes

whitelotusaromatics.com

white-lotus
February 2015
By Jeremy Girard

Parallax Scrolling 101: The Good, The Bad and The Beautiful

Let's dive in and explore the latest trend in website design from every angle.
Read the article

Parallax Scrolling 101: The Good, The Bad and The Beautiful

One of the hottest trends in website design is parallax scrolling. First employed by Ian Coyle on the Nike Better World site in 2011, this is a special scrolling technique wherein background images move by the camera – or in this case, your computer screen – more slowly than images in the foreground, thereby creating an illusion of depth in what is in reality a two-dimensional environment on your screen.

With its explosive popularity, you have likely seen this effect in use but may not have known exactly what it was or how parallax scrolling is reshaping the landscape of today’s Web. But just like any trend or technique, parallax scrolling is not the right fit for every site, and it does have a few drawbacks. To help you decide whether this is a bandwagon you should jump on, let’s dive in and take a look at parallax scrolling from every angle – the good, the bad and the beautiful.

The good

The obvious benefit of parallax scrolling is its undeniable visual wow factor. Even though this technique has become very popular of late, it is still not so overdone that it has become commonplace. This means that any site that uses this approach well will make a lasting impression on its visitors. In a world where every company and organization is looking for a way to stand out from the crowd, this can be a powerful advantage.

The bad

While the bold visual impact of parallax scrolling is hard to beat, there is a downside to all that eye-popping punch: due to the weight of these graphic-intensive designs, these sites generally take a bit longer to load. In our modern age of impatience, this could potentially be a deal-breaker. Many people will not wait more than a few seconds for your site to load, so if your awesome parallax scrolling means that you have a 20-second load time (which is not unheard of), that is a big problem.

The reason that parallax sites take longer to load is due to the size of the images that must be used to create this style of presentation. As a result, you must be cautious in how you implement this technique. It's easy to overdo it, thereby making your site so large and cumbersome that you’ll turn away customers who aren’t inclined to wait for the page and its images to load.

If you are considering incorporating a parallax effect on your site, be sure to consider performance and work with your web development team to ensure that all images are optimized so that your site not only looks great but also loads as quickly as possible.

The beautiful

Let’s look at a few examples of parallax scrolling that really amp up the wow factor:

Life Of Pi

LifeofPi

The website for the movie Life of Pi illustrates the incredible journey of not only the characters in the film but also of the filmmakers who took on this challenging story.

Through the use of numerous still images taken from the film and pieced together, the implementation of the scrolling technique here gives the illusion of video content, providing an element of motion that really enhances the presentation.

Other effects used include images that start out black and white or as sketches and are colored in as you scroll down the page, as well as content that appears from the sides of the screen. In this way, the site is the perfect reflection of a film that relies heavily on visual effects, recreating that feeling of “movie magic” on the screen for its visitors.

Rimmel London

Rimmel

Rimmel London's site uses a traditional parallax effect, where images of the company's products appear in the foreground and scroll at a different rate than those in the background. This gives the site a sense of visual interest and perception of dimension that you simply would not get with flat, static photographs.

Parallax.js

JS

This site, which is a sandbox aimed at web developers, has an incredibly complex and layered implementation of the parallax effect.

The scene depicted has multiple layers of ocean waves that move at different speeds and patterns along with a lighthouse that bobs up and down to give the illusion of an undulating seascape. For added effect, users on mobile devices equipped with a gyroscope can use the orientation of the device to manipulate the way the page moves and flows.

As this intricately layered demonstration of the parallax scrolling effect shows, with so many layers and axes of motion at your disposal, there is a mind-boggling array of possibilities for the kind of experience you could design for your visitors.

Make Your Money Matter

Money

The purpose behind this website is to illustrate the difference between putting your money in a bank versus a credit union.

As you scroll down the page, a series of whimsical illustrations are layered into the page to tell the story of “where your money really goes” when you put it in a bank. In doing so, a topic that is fairly dry and serious becomes much more engaging and approachable through the strength of its presentation. The end result is much more powerful than it would be had the site’s owners simply published a flat page of content and bullet points relating this same information.

Sony

Sony
In much the same way as the site for Life of Pi, Sony uses a series of photographic images strung together to create the sensation that the visitor is watching a video in motion, as Sony’s products – ranging from a 4k television screen, speakers, a smartphone and more – appear to assemble themselves right before their very eyes.

This is a very cool presentation technique that far surpasses what traditional still photography alone could capture. Even a video of the product assembly process would not be nearly as engaging, because here, there is the added element of surrealism where the user’s scroll is what controls the build of the products.

TEDxGUC

TED

The site for TedxGUC is far less intricate than others covered so far, but it’s still a great example of how parallax scrolling can deliver a narrative via the Web.

Using nothing but elementary illustrations and some well-written copy, this approach conveys its intended message much more effectively than it could through a few paragraphs of text alone. In fact, the strength of this site is in its simplicity, which goes to show that you do not need to be as over-the-top as the Life of Pi or Sony examples in order to use make effective use of the parallax scrolling technique. Sometimes, less is, in fact, more.

But does it convert?

The million dollar question is whether parallax scrolling has any measurable impact on the power of a website to convert leads and customers. While the results are still hazy on that front, a Purdue University study from 2013 did find that “although parallax scrolling enhanced certain aspects of the user experience, it did not necessarily improve the overall user experience.” This is, of course, just one attempt to evaluate a relatively new technique, but it is noteworthy.

That being said, this particular study did not take into account the memorability of the sites included. The ability of parallax scrolling sites to make a lasting impression is one of their key benefits – one which could theoretically have a very real effect on the site’s ability to capture and convert customers.

In summary

While the business benefits of parallax scrolling are yet to be fully determined, the visual wow factor of this technique is very appealing and is one of the main reasons it has become such a popular trend. In the end, like any element of web design and marketing, parallax scrolling is something that you and your trusted web development team will need to decide whether or not it is a fit for your brand and your website.