Birdfeeder Design and a Good Use of Website Animation

I’m a fan of bird­feed­ers and clever prod­uct design. The Architect’s Bird­feeder, designed by Doug Patt Pratt, is good look­ing and an intrigu­ing engi­neer­ing solution.

The key fea­ture — it ships like flat-pack fur­ni­ture but bet­ter because it goes together with­out that nasty cheap lit­tle hex wrench thing.

The ani­ma­tion of the assem­bly of the bird­feeder on the home page of the site is brilliant.

• It takes up only part of the page — good for those on slow con­nec­tions as you can start using the page before the ani­ma­tion fin­ishes loading.
• It offers infor­ma­tion about the prod­uct that can best (per­haps only) be com­mu­ni­cated using animation.
• There’s very lit­tle excess infor­ma­tion in the ani­ma­tion. Just a lit­tle sparkle toward the end of the assem­bly on the hang­ing wire. Very effec­tive in sig­nal­ing the end of the process.

I first saw this in one of my RSS feeds (can’t find it again — drat) and I’m hop­ing that I can get one. Though with the pub­lic­ity I wouldn’t be sur­prised to find that they are sold out. I’m not sure how well it will work in the ridicu­lous amount of rain we get here in the win­ter but as a sum­mer feeder feeder it’s going to be aces.