Tony's
Chocolonely
Front‑end development for Tony's Chocolonely's website and Chocoshop rebuild, using Node.js, Sass, and GSAP to create animated templates for integration into Laravel.
In Detail
New vs. Old
By 2017, Tony's original WordPress website no longer reflected the scale or personality of the brand, and its non‑responsive, slow‑loading front end had become increasingly limiting.
The replacement introduced a far more flexible, animated experience built around Tony's distinctive visual identity, mission‑led content, and growing e‑commerce requirements.
A Colourful, Animated Experience
The website was structured around three distinct areas: mission content to the left in red, the Chocoshop to the right in white, and the main homepage in blue. Large arrow‑based navigation and animated page transitions created the feeling of moving laterally between them.
GSAP animation extended that sense of movement across the wider interface, with scroll and mouse interactions helping the digital experience feel closer to Tony's physical brand world.
The Chocoshop
The Chocoshop balanced product discovery with Tony's wider brand messaging. Product listing and product detail pages used a cleaner white background, allowing the colour and irregular shape of the chocolate bars to carry the visual identity.
Product listing pages combined a distinctive product spinner with a more conventional grid, filtering, and direct add‑to‑basket functionality.
Products in Detail
Product detail pages were responsively designed around product imagery, bar size, purchase options, and brand messaging, keeping the buying journey clear without losing Tony's distinctive campaign‑led tone.
Fun Alongside a Serious Message
The 'Our Mission' page gave visitors a deeper view of Tony's work against exploitation in the cocoa industry. The challenge was to communicate a serious, hard‑hitting message without losing the brand's playful character, using JavaScript‑driven stop‑frame animation to add movement and emphasis.
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John Kavanagh is a highly intelligent and truly senior front‑end web developer, who's surprisingly well versed in the arcana of CSS. For Macmillan he was initially churning out static templates on an SCSS BEM architecture, but soon moved on to managing the team (three developers), assigning and tracking tasks using a Trello board he introduced, and helping me nudge the team towards an integrated, Web Components based production pipeline. I enjoyed John's productivity and attitude, and I very much look forward to working together again."
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John Kavanagh is a very talented front‑end web developer. He is enthusiastic, up‑beat, very knowledgeable in his field and has a great eye for detail. He brought a lot to our team and to the product, I would be happy to work with him again."
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John Kavanagh's biggest strength is his ability to deal with conflicting priorities in high‑pressure situations. Along with his excellent development skills, John's ability to manage difficult stakeholders and requirements is one of the key reasons that the projects he led were completed on time without too many problems."
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I worked with John Kavanagh on a high profile, large‑scale project at a digital agency. John was great to work with, solving problems without any input and contributing to the project way beyond what was expected. I'd happily work with him again and would easily recommend his talent to everyone!"
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John Kavanagh is one of the best front‑end developers I've had the pleasure of working with. Incredibly knowledgeable, great attention to detail – he understands design and why it's important to get it right, and he's also very experienced coding for accessibility. Always professional but with a great sense of fun, John would be an asset to any team and project."
