CrossFit / Fitness · Shoreditch, London
CrossFit / Fitness · Shoreditch, London
The Brief
A Shoreditch CrossFit gym with a cult following and a Wix site that looked identical to every other fitness brand. Founded by ex-army PT Marcus Webb. Underground facility. No mirrors. No machines. The site needed to repel the wrong people as decisively as it recruited the right ones.
The Challenge
Most fitness websites are visually indistinguishable — stock photos of impossibly fit people, soft gradients, the word "journey" used as both noun and verb. The challenge was building a site that communicated Marcus's actual gym: hard, serious, specific. A site that a CrossFit devotee and a casual gym-goer would respond to very differently — by design.
The Approach
Barlow Condensed at 800 weight, 180px desktop. This isn't typography, it's architecture. The word FORGE occupies the viewport the way a barbell occupies a platform: dense, purposeful, impossible to ignore. A dot-grid background pattern is a reference to graph paper — the material of training logs and programme design.
Every GSAP animation runs at 0.3 seconds instead of the industry standard 0.6–0.8 seconds. The halved duration is intentional: it communicates pace. The gym moves at a different speed than the world outside. The entrance animations match that.
The timetable is a hand-built CSS Grid: days as columns, time slots as rows, class types as coloured cells. No plugin, no external calendar. The CSS is 40 lines. It works perfectly on mobile. That discipline — building the right thing from scratch instead of reaching for a package — is the same discipline the gym asks of its athletes.
Tech Stack
Technical Decisions
0.3s across all entrance animations — twice as fast as standard, intentionally aggressive. The speed is the brand.
CSS radial-gradient(circle, #151515 1px, transparent 1px) at 24px spacing. No image, no extra request, infinite scale.
display:grid with named grid-template-areas — readable CSS, zero JavaScript. Monday through Saturday across six columns, time slots down the rows.