Matt Gibbins

Ahead of the release of Paddington in Peru, the third film in the Paddington series, I was contacted with the task of redesigning and refreshing the Official Paddington Store. They felt their current store did not accurately represent the brand, personality and visual assimilation the Paddington world.

Paddington is a beloved character, and the store needed to reflect that. The design was required to highlight the various incantations of Paddington - Classic Paddington, The Adventures of Paddington, modern Paddington, and the Paddington films (in particular the as-then unreleased Paddington in Peru), with a focus on the character's love of adventure and exploration. The site features a clean, modern design with a focus on usability and accessibility.

The store is built on Shopify, and I worked with the Paddington team to create a custom theme that reflects the character's personality and the brand's values. The site features a custom homepage, category and product pages, and a blog, as well as a custom checkout process. It had to be taken into consideration that the store is accessed, and purchased from, by people from around the world.

The work took place between May and August 2024. I was hired for additional work on the site in both February, 2025 and May, 2025 for promotions and additional functionality.

HateCrime.FYI is a website that tracks hate crimes against the LGBTQI+ community throughout Europe and Russia.

I was hired by Alexander Sasha Kondakov PhD – Assistant Professor at University College Dublin's School of Sociology, and Sergei Katsuba a PhD Candidate at the Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin and visiting researcher at King's Russia Institute, King's College London with the aim of creating a central source of information that could be referenced by both UCD students and the wider public.

Using Statamic as a base Content Management System, I built the site from the ground up to include many custom areas including a crime map which displays the amount of crimes in every country/region of Europe and Russia, a blog and a database area allowing visitors to search and sort all data by regions, crime, victim and more.

I retain ownership of the code and design, but the content is owned by UCD. The source code could be used as a base for similar projects in the future, and I am happy to discuss this with anyone who is interested.

After the site was launched, I continued to work with UCD to add new features and functionality, including a custom search engine that allows users to search for specific crimes or regions, and a custom API that allows other websites to access the data. Upon transfer of ownership all management and hosting was handled by UCD.

For more information about the project, you can read the UCD press release.