MelWide Scrap

Scrap metal is a category where every site looks the same: a stock photograph of a yard, a price list, a phone number. The brief was to build the one that does not — something a supplier remembers having seen, without pretending the business is something other than what it is.

The business is genuinely industrial and the site could not be precious about that. Anything that read as a design agency showing off would have cost the trust the yard already has. It also had to work on a phone held in one hand, outdoors, by someone who wants a price and a number — so whatever the page did visually could not get between a visitor and those two things.

A near-black ground with copper and a real brand green on it — the colours of the material itself rather than of a palette picked for a website. Two loops carry the page: a copper glow cycles through the four feature cards one at a time, and a ticker of the metal categories runs continuously along the bottom of every page on a green-to-copper strip. Both are ambient, both are slow, and neither waits for a visitor to do anything.

A scrap metal site that looks like nothing else in the category and still puts the price list and the phone number a thumb away. The category ticker doubles as the site’s own index of what the yard takes, which was the question the phone was ringing about.