Chilango

The brief

We were contacted by Chilango co-founders Dan Houghton and Eric Partaker on the strength of previous work they had seen from our creative director: “We want these guys”. Several meetings and phone calls later we became the website build partner for Chilango and brand design experts iamonline (iam - www.i-amonline.com).

Before we had even dotted an 'i' on the contracts, Chilango informed us of a monolithic and immovable deadline which was pegged to the launch of the flagship restaurant at Fleet Street. We assured the Chilango boys that the deadline would be met and with a healthy dose of cayenne pepper in the pants, production began immediately.

Design

Iam created a series of design mock-ups for the Chilango site which gave Ego a great platform to launch from. After several design iterations and amendments, the visuals for Chilango were complete and ready for build. Ego ensured every colour transcribed accurately and every heading, image and button was placed with pixel-level perfection.

Technical

The Chilango site was constructed in Adobe Flash CS3 using some native Flash components, bespoke code libraries and a blend of traditional Actionscript 2 and Object Oriented code. Most of the animations were executed using a mixture of the Fuse tweening package and dedicated tweening packages written especially for the project.

Chilango now have the ability to manage almost any aspect of their website. The site structure, content and navigation are scalable and dynamic, all of which can be customised completely to their taste (boom-boom!) via the xml backend.

The result

After six weeks of intensive work, late nights and thorough testing, we flipped the switch and put www.chilango.co.uk live. National press reviews of the restaurant launch backed by the website were impressive. Over 4,000 tacos were made on the first day and the line of 'suits' queueing for a free sample of London's finest Mexican cuisine stretched hundreds of metres down Fleet Street.

The finished site is a riot of colour, texture and movement that screams of Mexican culture and cuisine and drags the user around the site, page to page, by their eyeballs and saliva glands. After sampling almost the entire menu on launch night, we are in a position to heartily recommend the beef tacos and the spicy salsa, Chilango!