Responses by Frédéric Marchard, president and creative director, Locomotive.

Background: The purpose of the site is to promote and showcase the world’s first all-electric travel trailers by vehicle company Lightship. We overhauled the site in collaboration with San Francisco–based branding agency Manual, who provided a sleek new brand identity and high-quality content for the project.

The new website became the digital destination for the launch of Lightship’s electric RV prototype at SXSW 2023 in Austin, Texas. The target audience is potential buyers and enthusiasts of travel trailers who are interested in sustainability and environmental presentation. The site is designed to provide an immersive, accessible experience that showcases the new electric RV model, letting consumers preorder the vehicle online.

Larger picture: The website introduced new e-commerce capabilities in order to support the preorder campaign at the official launch. It ended up being a great success with a large number of orders and quite a few recognitions.

Design core: The Lightship website showcases the world’s first all-electric travel trailers with a grand and immersive feel. Its sleek, accessible design is complemented by microinteractions that enhance the user experience. The website also provides plenty of useful information for potential buyers, including technical specifications, pricing and preorder options through Charcoal CMS and e-commerce integration using Stripe. The rich and immersive content, including high-quality images and videos, reflects Lightship’s commitment to sustainable travel and a sense of adventure.

Overall, the website’s core features and design provide an engaging, informative experience that invites users to explore and dream of their next travel adventure.

Favorite details: Our team takes pride in the digital art direction of the Lightship website, in collaboration with our good friends at Cape Town–based design firm Studio Malvah. We created a design that was visually stunning, engaging and informative. We achieved this through the use of user-friendly layouts, subtle microinteractions and the right dose of motion.

Challenges: Building a website for a pioneering company like Lightship was no easy feat. The most difficult aspect of this project as the incredibly short timeline of about three months from start to finish, which required the team to work quickly and efficiently without compromising on quality and user experience. The website had to be completed in time for the SXSW event in March 2023, which added to the pressure.

However, the team’s passion and creativity were instrumental in delivering an immersive, engaging website that truly captures the essence of Lightship’s sustainable, innovative approach to recreational travel trailers. Through collaboration and open-mindedness to finding the best solutions, the team was able to overcome the challenges and deliver a website that exceeded expectations.

Technology: The Lightship website was developed on our open-source Charcoal CMS, while Locomotive Boilerplate was used to provide a solid foundation. To add interactive and engaging elements, we employed Locomotive Scroll for scrolling animations such as parallax effects, as well as modularload to enhance page transitions, ScrollyVideo for rich content management and Stripe for payment processing. In addition, we also implemented focus-trap to ensure good accessibility.

Finally, the website features several animation libraries such as bezier-easing, GSAP and Lottie for various animation effects. Overall, the website uses a combination of cutting-edge technologies and programming languages to create an exceptional user experience.