Halcyon Cycles
Website and frame configurator for a handmade bicycle builder
- Category
- Web
- Year
- 2025
- Services
- Art Direction · Web Design · Frame Configurator · Photography Direction
A site for a two-person steel frame builder that sells the way the frames are built: slowly, in detail, with everything visible.
The brief
Halcyon is two people, one frame jig, and a two-year waiting list. Their old site was a photo dump — beautiful frames, no story, no way to understand what you were actually commissioning when you put down a deposit. They didn’t want an e-commerce site. They wanted a site that works like a shop visit.
What we did
The site is built around the build. Every frame page walks through geometry, tubing, and braze work in plain language, with photography shot in the workshop rather than a studio — chips on the bench, flux on the torch. The centerpiece is a frame configurator: pick a model, set your measurements, choose paint, and watch a spec sheet assemble itself in real time. It exports a PDF that goes straight into the builder’s queue.
Type does the heavy lifting: one warm cream ground, one charcoal grotesque, generous margins. No carousels, no modals, nothing that gets between a rider and a frame.
The outcome
Deposit inquiries doubled in the first two months, and — more important to the builders — the quality of inquiries changed. People arrive having already read about lugs versus fillet brazing. The configurator cut pre-order email back-and-forth roughly in half, which for a two-person shop is two evenings a week back at the bench.
The Process
