Summary

The Academy Brand came to us looking to refresh their brand, along with a full website redesign that would allow greater flexibility to create and manage content on their website.

Year

2017

Role

Senior Designer

Contribution

UX · UI · Research · Art Direction

Testimonials

Client needs

Business goals

Easy and flexible to merchandise and run promotions.

A digital refresh to align and influence the evolution of the brand.

Easy integrate to services like Afterpay and Algolia

Problem

Content teams are investing too much time and effort fixing and managing content due to rigid components and templates.

APPROACH

The largest challenge going into this project for our team was scope, so we had to be incredibly resourceful with where we focused our time.

With that in mind, we agreed the priority was to focus on basic core ecommerce features that we knew would meet their needs.

Style boards

As part of a re-design, the client and their internal design team were also seeking guidance on font selections and pairings going forward.

Style board explorations played an important role in decision making on the direction that would be rolled out across both web and print collateral for the brand.

Type refresh

Academy Brand were seeking a more contemporary feel from their type. After multiple rounds of changes, we landed on Miller and FF Mark — the class and elegance of Miller contrasting with the masculine geometry of FF Mark.

Lookbook

Looking at Academy Brand's analytics and Hotjar videos of their existing lookbook behaviour we discovered some unpredictable behaviour patterns. With no way to shop a look or link through to a featured product, users were leaving this feature misguided.

The approach for the lookbook was to allow users to maintain their focus on the products by allowing them the functionality to browse and shop a look.

A design system beyond the project

Feeling frustrated with the time and budget allocated for such a project, we brainstormed ideas that could free up some time in future projects. We identified the key areas that could be re-applied with future clients in hope to streamline those early steps in setting up styles and also to align design and developer teams in a fast paced environment.