Forget your trainers or Oxford brogues, the most common type of footwear on the planet is the humble flip flop.
To some pople though they're far from humble. They are often the first type of footwear that many people own; their first step up from going barefoot.
In researching her book, Flip Flop - A Journey Through Globalisation's Backroads, Professor Caroline Knowles of Goldsmiths University followed the life of a pair of flip flops. From extracting the raw material in the oil fields of Kuwait to production in Korea and China, to market and finally landfill in Ethopia, Caroline traces the route of this ubiquitous product. Along the way we meet the people involved; riggers, factory workers and even smugglers.
It was obviously such an interesting project that even with the limited budget we were keen to create an interactive website that did justice to the stories. Frankly we're really pleased with the result.
We had free rein to develop the look and feel of the site so Andy from our design partners Periscope was able to create a whole brand from scratch.
We experimented with a few user interface designs including having an Open Street Map slippy map before deciding on a illustrated version of the trail that users can interact with.
The interface is mobile first so you can swipe though all the information screens and works really nicely on tablet devices.
The content is managed using a simple admin interface we created, allowing drag and drop reordering of the slides.
All in all a really enjoyable project and well worth a look.
