Mirror Finish
Detailing

The problem

Detailing sells on a before and after, which is the one thing most detailing websites cannot honestly show. Stock libraries hold no two photographs of the same car, and swirl-marked paint reads as nothing at all unless the light is exactly right.

Mirror Finish is invented, so there was no customer's car to photograph either. The question worth answering was whether the site could still make the argument without faking the evidence.

The approach

It took three attempts. The first drew swirl marks over a headlight close-up and read as a filter rather than a dirty car. The second rendered convincing road film onto a clean photograph, which was believable and still wrong, because the point was that the photography should be real.

What shipped is two unedited photographs wiped between by a raking line of light: a mud-packed wheel as it arrives, and a cleaned alloy. Wheels turned out to be the only subject where two different cars match closely enough on framing and scale to sit side by side. The caption says exactly that, and the section is called “What comes in. What goes back.” rather than claiming to show the paint correction it cannot.

The details

• The animation library was built in, then deleted. The motion ran on GSAP first. At this level an intersection observer and one scroll handler did the same job in 6.4KB instead of 52KB, and mobile performance went from 86 into the mid nineties.
• The hero was chosen by measurement. The original photograph scored 10.7 out of 255 for average brightness, effectively black with nothing to recover. Around forty-five candidates were scored at the actual hero crop, then the shortlist was judged inside the real layout with the headline in place.
• Honest about what's invented. The business, prices, reviews and FAQ are illustrative and listed in the project's notes. There is deliberately no rating, no review count and no accreditation, because those are the claims that do real damage when they turn out to be false.
• A number that cannot ring. The phone number comes from the range Ofcom reserves for drama, so it can never reach a real person.