PDP Gaming came to Barrel for a new website with their latest rebrand that prioritizes community and inclusivity for their design-forward gaming products.
Their rebrand was colorful, bold, and imaginative to begin with, so the opportunity to vomit rainbows was definitely on our minds. The challenge with that was the website would compete with the already-colorful products. We decided that a bold first impression would be enough where the rest of the homepage gave space for the products and lifestyle imagery would speak for itself.
One of the things that spoke to me when we initially kicked off the project was the fact that they recognized girls in the gaming space as well as the various age groups who enjoy video games. As a casual female gamer myself, the inclusivity of the brand truly excited me. To highlight their mission of community, inclusivity, and personal expression on the homepage, we developed an interactive scroll animation that brought their brand to life.
When you start any video game, you learn to move your character and see what happens if you press certain buttons. We thought it was just as important to bring interactivity to PDP’s website through hover effects that mimic what it feels like when you’re in a video game such as the curiosity of hovering over things.
The word “community” kept speaking to us and a big part of any community is having constant support. This led us to highlight all the support resources they have on their website. If you notice their logo, it’s this blob shape that represents the ever-changing and progressiveness of the brand. We saw this as an opportunity to create branded icons to go in the support section of the footer. The icons were created by Valentin Nguyen.
One “what if” that our client came to us with was “what if the product pages were customized to each product” – this was a brilliant, creative idea but the challenge it held was the upkeep of each product page. We’ve collaborated with our developers in strategizing a page template for PDP’s team to customize each product page efficiently.
Another part of the website was tying in PDP’s e-sport line called Victrix. People who play video games competitively typically strive for a dark, cool aesthetic. Once you enter the Victrix side of the site, you’re brought into this alternate universe of PDP. You’ll notice we kept with the consistency of the UI design system from fonts to button styles, but it became a dark mode version of PDP.
