Splash Page for La Sirena Cigars

Backstory: La Sirena is the latest release from Miami Cigar & Company, the folks behind standout brands like Nestor Miranda, Don Lino, and a handful of others, if you know anything about Cigars. Smoking cigars is like eating oysters or lobster – you don’t see any bums indulging in these activities, it’s reserved for winners.

The introduction to the La Sirena Cigars brand manager, Arielle Ditkowich, was alley-ooped to me from Max Mogil – currently the Senior PPC analyst and CEO for MogilMEDIA. La Sirena Cigars looked to DoggHouse Productions to crush their splash page, full web site, and full line of product photography.

The splash page is so f’ing cool! The design borrows some code from Iann Lunn and his Sequence.JS theme which features a horizontal sliding parallax effect. Arielle & I brainstormed and collaborated on this project for a few weeks tossing around the idea of having an animated site, but without using any Flash. I had seen the old Nike Freeworld site, and was blown away by its sleek features and simplicity.

I gathered several images and Photoshopped a bunch of collages together to create the backgrounds. The animated pieces were compiled and treated heavily with the lasso tool and magic wand tool in Photoshop.

The splash helps to paint a picture, but more accurately tell the story of the myth behind La Sirena Cigars. The story was written in collaboration with La Sirena Cigars Director of Marketing, Barry Stein – who is also the director of marketing for Miami Cigar & Company. The story is captivating, clever, and features the names of all the cigars peppered throughout it.