The making of a magazine.
By — Amit Das, SVP Design
At my cousin’s engagement a few months ago, I wanted to surprise the women with Urban Company’s Nail Art service. Among them were my mother-in-law, granny, wife, and other close relatives. During the service, a moment occurred that shifted my perspective on how we presented Nail Art on the app. While the app offered a wide range of colours and patterns, something interesting happened — my family members began bringing their dresses and ethnic wear. They sought the Nail artists’ advice in selecting a design that would perfectly complement their outfits for both the evening and the following day.
This small incident reminded me of IKEA. On their website, one can visualise the room (with tons of inspirations) it could be and pick furnitures, accessories to bring the vision to reality. That’s what we wanted to change in how women book Nail Art services -help them visualise and then give options to book one.
We launched Urban Company’s first in-app magazine — ELEMENTAL!
First things first. If you want to skip the rest of this article and want to have a look at what is this magazine I’m talking about, open Urban Company app and navigate to Nails to find the magazine.
Why a magazine?
The purpose was simple. A user should be able to:
- visualise what the kind of nail art would look great
- get ideas from inspiration they can relate to
- feel confident to try a nail art service
There were many ideas on the table — building an AR capability to directly see on fingers, building an image-hot-linking capability and such. These were great but would take months to build & test. So, we took an existing capability of static pages within the app to kick off the magazine. This option required no development, and we could take it live within 10 days.
Also, to position this new concept, we took a digital magazine approach. Magazines don’t feel transactional. They feel casual, good, and low commitment.
Once we agreed on the direction, the entire content team came together to create a hackathon style activity.
The kind of magazine & contents
We looked the popular print magazines — ELLE, GQ, VOGUE, and more. It felt like only ~25% of the content is really useful and the rest were ads and fillers. For our first edition, we didn’t want the magazine to feel like a drag. We wanted it to be sharp, short, super value adding, and genuinely interesting. We didn’t want to make ELEMENTAL like ELLE or VOGUE, we wanted to make it like Lonely Planet guides.
It was July and the monsoons were knocking. We got an idea to showcase nail arts that go perfectly well on you during the monsoons. We also stumbled upon very interesting facts about the evolution of nail art. Finally, we covered just three topics, and they were:
- Trendy styles for the monsoons (Cover story)
- History of nail art
- Outfit ideas to match trendy nail arts
Generative AI
While Mayank Dhawan & Ganesh Deherkar were leading the entire project including the magazine’s structure, design language, layout, and every pixel, a magazine also needed photos. Lots of them.
Stock photos were too stock-ish. Photoshoot would have cost us weeks. Daryil Lobo took it upon himself to nail (pun intended) all images for the magazine. Daryil, with 100+ prompt trials & killer Photoshop skills, created what nobody could identify as AI-generated. We were also asked for agency contacts who did the photoshoots!
A magazine also needs copy. Since we’re still looking for a content writer, Shalini Mookerjee stepped in and using her imagination, writing skills and ChatGPT produced all the copy in the magazine — cover-to-cover!
Folks behind the magazine
Mayank Dhawan • Ganesh Deherkar • Daryil Lobo • Shalini Mookerjee • Sarthak Gera (our one-man army for deployment & content analytics)
What’s next?
We received amazing feedback on the magazine. Our users appreciated the short & crisp format. They loved that it’s nothing random and felt like a part of the app. We’ll start working on the next edition of ELEMENTAL magazine, which features a brand new theme.
If you want to be part of this (and more), we’re hiring Content Writer, Motion Designer, Graphic Designer, Interns in Motion Design and Graphic Design. Apply here.
I’m interested in almost anything and everything. My childhood has influenced heavily on how I observe, or even get excited about things around me. My parents got me to learn Hawaiian guitar when I was 8 years old. I used to create a lot of scrapbooks with good photographs cutting from old newspapers and magazines.
