Carrie Cunningham

Responsive Website

Katherine Tachibana
Sep 4, 2018 · 5 min read

Summary of Project

Task

Create a beautiful and elegant responsive website to showcase the peculiar style of the client and let the users find inspiration / buy the antiques.

Target Audience

  • Age: 30s — 50s
  • Homeowners who think to refurbish their properties
  • People who are interested in buying antiques/artworks

Primary Keywords

elegant, classic, art deco, artistic, sophisticated

Secondary Keywords

beautiful, inspiring, multicultural, antique, traveller

Key functionalities:

  • Create a brand identity and tone of voice
  • Create an interior design website which is artistically elegant and stylish and easy to navigate
  • The website will show Carrie’s style and taste
  • Create an E-commerce website to highlight Carrie’s antiques and collaboration with artists

Team

UI: Katherine Tachibana
UX: Fiona Brownlie
UX: Rebecca Frearson
UX: Rita Patricio

Tools

Hand-drawings, Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, InVision, Google Slides

Timeline

3 weeks

Carrie Cunningham is planning to create a new business as an interior designer and our client representative for creating brand identity and a website about interior design and E-commerce. In our meeting she mentioned us types of feelings and what functionalities she would like to have in her new website:

  • Mainly “About Me” section
  • Beautiful and elegant
  • Target audience would be people who understand art and have experiences in different cultures
  • “Showcase” section to allow potential customers to understand her background and style
  • Easy to navigate

Following after the organization of all the data points came the construction of two mood boards that would lead into two explorable directions.

“British Colonial Style” which was working based on the feelings of travel. The ideas that the client’s personal background — international experiences, meets the history of Britain — conquering the seven seas. The board focused on three things: checker patterns, tropical plants and travel. It was inspired by a story from one of the interviews.

“Childhood” was working based on the feelings of her personal memories. The board focused on two things: Art Deco style and tulips.

Mood Board in Art Deco Theme
Style Tile in Art Deco Theme

The selected art direction above entitled “Art Deco” had many ideas that resonated and aligned with Carrie’s background. Carrie didn’t have any branding yet, but she wanted to make it a combination of classic and contemporary feel, so I decided to use tulips as the brand’s main imagery. The colour was fresh tones found in art deco colour palettes. As the iteration process continued the dark green was eventually taken out to create a more succinct colour trio between the Bordeaux red, dark olive and light olive.

The above image is about the process of creating a logo:

  1. Sketches: brainstorming
  2. The first logo: it represents a tulip flower in an abstract expression; however, I decided to create a completely different version at the last minute because when I put it into the presentation slides, the logo made it looked like a tech company or something.
  3. The finalised logo: it represents a tulip flower on top of two leaves with curly motifs represent CC — Carrie Cunningham.

As usual, I stayed flexible to update the style guide when necessary. The finalised colour palettes are as followings:

Dark Artichoke #28441D
Dark Olive #5B5B29: Newly added in a high fidelity prototype phase
Light Olive #ADAD62
Pale Moss Green #FFFFE9: Changed from #FBFBD9
Bordeaux Red #721420
Light Grey #DCDCDC

Salmon Pink and Sienna were removed.

There were some changes also in typefaces. Originally, French Script and Bodoni were planned to use; however, Montserrat and Bodoni were used instead to increase the legibility of the text.

The full high fidelity prototype for mobile in InVision is available. Please visit at: https://invis.io/MHNTEPEY3QR#/317408096_Splash_Screen

The Big Challenges

This project was really a big challenge for me.
Our client was hopeful and full of ideas with an unresolved business objective. The timeline was only three weeks in total and the direction requested by the client altered twice in the first week. As a team, we wanted to meet her requests as much as we can; however, we needed to proceed with the processes without having a tangible direction to meet the schedule.

A day before the client presentation, we found out that what we created was not a responsive webpage. Despite that, we tackled the issue together and overcame it.

Things that I have learnt from this project are:

  • Be confident
  • Sometimes I need to push the teammates to do my part with plenty of time, to avoid sitting up until four in the morning a day before the presentation.

What I am happy about

L to R: Katherine, Fiona, Becca, Rita

My teammates were just so fabulous. They encouraged me when I was feeling down, they gave me so much energy. I really appreciated them.

I improved the commands of Sketch and Illustrator overall. Of course, this “improvement journey” will never come to the end, but I can confidently say I can use Sketch at least.

Finally, many thanks for reading my case study!

Katherine Tachibana

Written by

A passionate UI designer based in London

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