Chester's Pumpkinator

Studio

HYFN

Type

Site Design • Social

Client/Partner

Frito Lay • The Marketing Arm

Role

UX/UI • Motion • Development

Overview

Turning seasonal campaigns into playful interactive experiences

Chester's Pumpkinator was a Halloween-themed digital experience that invited users to carve, customize, and share virtual pumpkins while participating in a sweepstakes promotion.

Created as the successor to the Eggerator Easter campaign, the project expanded on the idea of transforming branded websites into interactive experiences that encouraged creativity, engagement, and repeat visits.

The goal was to combine playful interaction, character-driven animation, and promotional mechanics into an experience that felt more like a game than a traditional marketing website.

My Role

Combining design, animation, and technical implementation

I led the experience design, motion, and teamed up with engineering for the technical execution, working across interaction design, animation systems, and front-end implementation to create a highly interactive web experience. The project included custom animation tools, a sweepstakes flow, and a variety of animated moments designed to surprise and delight users.

To support these interactions, I explored game development techniques within the browser, using Phaser, a 2D game engine, alongside custom animation systems and inverse kinematics (IK) rigs to create expressive, high-performance experiences that felt fluid and responsive.

Design Approach

Bringing game techniques to the web

The experience was designed to feel playful, immediate, and rewarding before users even entered the sweepstakes. Every interaction from carving pumpkins to character animation was crafted to encourage experimentation and creativity while maintaining excellent performance across devices.

By borrowing techniques more commonly associated with game development, including real-time animation systems and game engines, the project delivered a level of interactivity and polish that pushed beyond the expectations of traditional promotional websites at the time.