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Finally Building The Thing

Friday, November 25th, 2016

The wheels are always in motion

when you’re a founder and there is an Everest-size mountain of new features to build. There are also certain moments that are worth pausing and reflecting upon. We hit one of those moments the other day when I realised with the launch of the Flyte website, we have finally built the tool we originally imagined. The idea of Pixel Together was hatched back in 2013 when my wife Renae Turner and I, had our web agency, Fidget Friend.

He started coding in Turbo Pascal at 8, by 13 was hacking pirate bulletin boards and by 25 was running teams of 100 engineers for Infosys in Bangalore. He then went on to run his own agency. Combined we have 16 years experience running design-driven agencies.

We were always fiercely focused on pushing the boundaries of front end web development. Before NewSat went bust and faced criminal action, they hired us to build a kick ass animated scrolling website for the launch of their rocket Jabiru2.

The website wasn't able to save their company, but we did manage to make some pretty cool shit happen in the browser using a JS animation library I hacked out to help make sequencing complex browser animations much easier. For people who don't know code, it was the equivalent of trying to edit music recorded to tape before the invention of pro tools.

The initial version of Pixel Together was called Animaker [1] and it was a product focused on creating immersive, animated web sites. I built a prototype and reached out to the best web designer I knew, Daniel Billingham, to join as co-founder. We put our heads together and decided the first step was to build the most flexible and design focused responsive layout editor, THEN we would get animation happening. Sounds sensible, right?

Turns out we massively underestimated the complexity of the layout piece. Usually in the website builder space you can have either creative freedom OR design/code quality but not both. We believe in 2016 it's time to have your cake and eat it too and we spent the best part of the last three years working on our editor, evolving the scope of what could be created and more recently launching animation.

Last week, this website launched. Everything you see on Flyte - the animations, the menu, the responsive layouts are designed visually in our editor.

Three years later you can now create the sites we envisioned 100% using Pixel Together. Massive thanks to the Flyte guys for choosing our platform for their brilliant, custom website.

[1] We changed the name because http://animaker.com/ launched before we finished development (we had http://animaker.io).