Sea to Summit are the leading manufacturer of outdoor travel accessories. They specialise in durable, innovative, lightweight and compact equipment. The project brief was to create a fully responsive e-commerce site. Because the brand was fairly new to the European market, the finished site also needed to increase brand awareness, communicate Sea to Summit’s unique ethos and history and to have an easy to use product page. My role was leading the design of the site. This included establishing the information architecture, providing detailed sitemaps and wireframes in the form of online prototypes, pitching and liasing with the client throughout the whole process, and the delivery the user interface design.
The finished site has several unique features. The homepage was designed with increasing brand awareness and to highlight the products and their technology. The landing page image acts as a cinemagraph with steam rising from the pots. One of my main goals was to make the experience as smooth as possible on all devices. I worked with the developers to achieve this by carefully tweaking the breakpoints, reducing image size and adding subtle web animations.
Once the site structure had been determined and I was starting on the UI I chose to propose potential visual directions to the client using style tiles. These are kind of bite-size collages of colours, applications of type and photograpy, colours and different web products (buttons, dropdowns etc..) created as a visual starting point for the client. A follow up meeting established their first impressions which helped me to design the next round of visuals.
I used style tiles along with the online prototyping app InVision to lease with the client. I find it makes editing and testing websites easy for clients and the design team alike.
Designed at Reflow Studio
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