Bliss Burial and Cremation — UI Case Study

Published in

The Startup

5 min readJul 9, 2019

Brief: Bliss Cremation and Green Burials, one of Canadas first environmentally conscious funeral care providers, came to my team in need of a new and improved responsive website.

The problem with the current website was that it didn't properly represent the business, convey the proper message, or evoke the emotions that the user should feel when using the website.

we were given the task to make a website that better represented Bliss’ brand.

Timeline

We had three weeks to complete this project

The Team

User Experience Designers: Seol Ah Park and Travis Tong

User Interface Designers: John Kwan, Fatimah Yasin and myself, Uma Danladi

Initial Client Meeting

For our first meeting with Godwyn, the owner of Bliss, our goal was to establish the scope of the project and fully understand the design requirements. From this meeting we learned a lot about Godwyn, his business, and the current problems he was facing.

Learnings

We learned that Godwyn currently had a website but wasn't happy with the generic imagery used. He wanted his brand to be more unique and personable.
Godwyn had current branding in place already, but was really open to changes being made
Godwyn has a unique approach to funeral services. Rather than mourning death, he wants to help his clients celebrate life.
Bliss was a business that really encouraged environmentally friendly methods of burial and cremation.

Take aways

What we took away from the meeting was that we would have to create an uplifting, more human design that conveyed a positive emotion for this website. Since the business was also environmentally conscious, we would want to incorporate nature within his branding and our design.

Gut Test

My team and I conducted a gut test to better understand Godwyns vision for his brand. We showed him around twenty images to see what would work for him and what wouldnt.

What Worked

A full length hero image that tied into the earth’s elements
The use of a lot of white space
A colour palette that included green to tie into his brand and love of nature

What Didn’t work

The use of boxes to contain content
Plain, dull color palettes
Dark backgrounds

Design Inception

Our design inception is what essentially drives our entire design. It’s a nice reminder of what we are trying to execute with our design.

The why

First we established the business’s “why”. We had to think deeply about what the business was trying to achieve. After a discussion with Godwyn about why he started his business, this came to us really easily. The business’s purpose is

Mood

We also came up with our desired mood and planned how we would convey that mood through visual language such as colour, space, movement, shape.

Design Directions

After our thorough research and planning we had enough data to move into the next steps of the design process. The team came up with two different design directions to present Godwyn so he could decide what would best suit his brand.

Environmental

The first design direction was focused on the environmental aspects of the business but still encompassed the desired moods from our design direction. Godwyn really liked this design direction but ultimately didn’t think the environmental direction would work for him.

Calm & Earthy

The second direction, the one that Godwyn chose was more focused on evoking calming emotions with its nature images and earthy colours. Godwyn liked this design direction because it incorporated the environment without being too literal.

Logo Design

Logo Iterations

Godwyn was adamant that the logo was a butterfly as it had a lot of meaning to him.

We all made our variations of a butterfly logo and let Godwyn pick which one to use.

Final Logo

Godwyn ended up choosing the butterfly from one logo and the typeface from another logo. The photo to the left is the final logo we created.

Style Tile

This is the final style tile showing the text, button styles, colours and icons used in the website. The final font pairing we used was Merriweather and Lato as it balances elegance with modernism.