Squirrel Design

I've worked with Squirrel Design since 2016, starting with their logo. In 2024 I redrew it for the new site, with light, dark and acorn versions.

The new website replaces their older treehouse site. It is a custom WordPress theme of about 7,100 lines of PHP, JavaScript and CSS:

• Projects. Every treehouse is a project with its own page, and the homepage and Treehouses page are filled from them.
• Gallery. 257 photos in 20 filters, packed without gaps, with paging and a lightbox.
• Motion. Animated heroes with GSAP and a sticky header that gets out of the way.
• Finish. A final design check of every page, for consistent spacing, type and colour, plus clear focus outlines for people who use a keyboard. Every photo shares one look, a 1960s film grade, first made by hand with levels and later with film60, my own Python grader. It brings out the warmth of the wood and gives the site its own visual identity.

A tool for planning a play area from a catalogue of parts, with prices as you go. The first phase is done: four content types, three admin screens, a catalogue feed over the WordPress REST API, and a pricing engine written twice, in PHP for the server and in JavaScript for the browser, both checked against the same test cases.

I run their server too. In 2026 I moved their sites to a new Ubuntu server (nginx, PHP-FPM, MySQL, Redis), set up their mail and cleaned up the old live site after it was hacked.