What I learned building award-winning experiences at Form5

When I joined Form5 in the fall of 2013, I thought I knew what frontend development was. I could write clean CSS, I understood responsive layouts, and I was comfortable with JavaScript. What I didn't understand yet was what it meant to truly build for the user.

A tiny studio on Klapparstígur

Form5 was a team of two when I joined; Steinar Ingi Farestveit, a designer, and Ólafur Örn Nielsen, a developer. We worked out of a small office in an old building on Klapparstígur in downtown Reykjavik, the same space where CCP Games was founded. Nobody outside the tech community cared about that, but for us it was a fun bit of history to sit in.

The space was tiny and simple, but it had a creative energy to it. We also worked regularly from cafés, mostly Te & Kaffi, which is something of an institution in Iceland. There was no rigid process, with three people, you just talk.

Side by side

I sat next to Steinar every day. Not in the handoff sense where a designer throws a file over the wall and a developer interprets it. We worked in parallel, side by side, building things together in real time. He would design, I would implement, and we would iterate on the spot. If something didn't feel right in the browser, we'd fix it together before moving on.

This fundamentally changed how I approached frontend development. Before Form5, I thought my job was to take a design and make it work. After Form5, I understood that my job was to make the experience be on point. Those are very different things.

Bump the lamp

Form5 had a philosophy they called "bump the lamp." It's a term coined by Disney animators working on Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1988, referring to the painstaking effort of getting small details right that most people will never consciously notice, but that make the whole thing feel better.

At Form5, this wasn't just an aspiration. It was built into every project timeline. The last week or two of any project was always dedicated to those small details that delight. The subtle hover transitions. The scroll behaviors. The micro-interactions that you don't notice, but feel. The things that separate something polished from something merely functional.

This is something I adopted deeply and still build into my workflow. When I plan a project today, there's always time at the end for bumping the lamp.

The work

Form5 focused purely on the UI. We didn't do backend work. Another party would handle integration, whether that was the client's internal team, a partnered agency, or a freelance developer the client already worked with. We'd stay involved enough to ensure nothing compromised the frontend experience, but our job was the interface and nothing else.

That focus was liberating. Every ounce of energy went into making the thing look and feel as good as it could.

We built experiences for brands like 66°North, Nikita Clothing, Bonfire Outerwear, Salomon, and Nova. The work got recognized: nikitaclothing.com won Best Icelandic Website and Best Company Website at the 2013 Icelandic Web Awards, and was nominated again in 2014 for Best Design and UI. Steinar also received the FÍT award for web design for nikitaclothing.com in 2014. We also built gengi.is, a currency conversion app born from an internal hackathon that used credit card exchange rates to reflect what you'd actually pay at a store abroad. It was nominated for Best App in 2014, and later won a FÍT award for web design in 2015.

What it set in motion

The biggest takeaway from Form5 wasn't a technology or a tool. It was learning that the best frontend work happens when design and development aren't separate disciplines but a single, continuous conversation, and that the difference between good and great is in the details nobody asked for.

Form5 eventually merged with Sprettur, a backend-focused agency, to form Kolibri. We'd already been collaborating with Sprettur and adopting parts of each other's culture. The principles we'd built at Form5, the attention to detail, the bump-the-lamp mentality, the designer-developer dialogue, all carried forward. But the scope grew enormously, and with it came a whole new set of challenges.