Graphic Design

Hurray! Something gorgeous to look at! This is Chloe’s first draft for the eCommerce website design for Harvey Maria. What do you think?

Remember the current website?

Visually and structurally there was a lot to do.

Make it feel more aspirational, easy to use and something that reflects our brand values and engages our target audience were just some of the elements of our brief from Harvey Maria.

The new look is certainly much cleaner, more sophisticated and more engaging. I love the new logo (which incidentally Harvey Maria brought with them from another agency, we all felt it worked really well and it adds a lot to the new design). The grey allows the fabulous tiles to shine and lets the flooring really speak for itself.

And here’s the Collection page

And this is the collection page as it stands. Improved navigation, a more sophisticated colour palette for the product information and the ability to access other collections from the same page make a real difference to the end result I think.

So I love the new design. I love the elegance, the sophisticated colour palette and the engaging typography. But this is very much a work in progress so we would love your thoughts and feedback!

Tagged as , ecommerce web design, Harvey Maria, powerful ecommerce in Case Studies, From The Studio, Graphic Design, Powerful Ecommerce, Web Design, Websites

Visually this post isn’t going to be quite as exciting as the post that came before and the one that follows. But it’s an important part of the eCommerce website journey and one that I think is important to share with you.

The Wireframes

Between every website brief and website design comes the planning and the wireframing. This is where we sketch out how the site will work, what bits need to go where and how the functional bits of the site will come together. In a simple brochure website this is often just a case of sketching out a couple of boxes, or perhaps even letting the designer take control at the design stage if it’s a very simple site.

With something more complex like the Harvey Maria ecommerce website, we needed a lot more time to get the structure right.

As I mentioned in my last post, not only was the design in need of a little TLC, we were also very keen to improve the functionality. Simple things like how visitors view and search for the floor tiles as well as wider issues like how they move around the site.

Planning, planning and more planning

Caroline, our Creative Director, Stuart, our Senior Web Developer, and I spent a long time planning how we would fit all the elements together. There was a lot of bashing our heads together around certain elements (the sampling service and the tile browsing spring to mind in particular!) and we thought long and hard about the structure, functionality, practicality, usability (is that enough ility’s?) as well as the social media elements of the site.

All the time we put in at the outset on this has really paid off. It’s meant that our clients have been able to focus solely on the functionality and structure without getting distracted by the pretty bits. And it has also meant that Chloe has been able to focus on making it look pretty, confident that the structure works.

Getting the detail right before the design

Here are the wireframes, in all their glory. It took four revisions to get this bit right, but as it was such a complex site it made a lot of sense.

Homepage

The current website is overwhelming in terms of where to click first and what to do. We wanted to make the journey as straightforward and funnelled as possible, which should make a big difference to the sites’ bounce rate and conversion rates. Still work to do at this point but the idea was that if you are looking for a particular type of flooring that you can find it from the homepage.

Things like showing the number of tiles in each section gives the visitor more power and knowledge and makes the experience on site more enjoyable.

And the final homepage layout.

Next up I’ll share with you the designs, and I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Tagged as , ecommerce website design, Harvey Maria, powerful ecommerce in Case Studies, From The Studio, Graphic Design, Powerful Ecommerce, Web Design, Websites

Harvey Maria create the most fabulous floors and we are delighted to be creating a new ecommerce website for them.

I had first come across the company when I was looking at some Cath Kidston floor tiles for our family bathroom, and so I was jumping through hoops when they approached us to help them develop their ecommerce website and make their brand more engaging. It could barely be more up our street!

Over the next couple of months I’m going to share the story around the project we’re doing for Harvey Maria, and I’d love your feedback along the way too. We’re at the stage where the wireframes for the new website have been signed off and we’re just about to proof the creative brand identity development and website design. It’s an exciting project for us because it allows us to bring together our passion for creating engaging design with our enthusiasm for ecommerce, and any brand that carries Cath Kidston is onto a winner in my eyes.

The Challenge

Harvey Maria’s current website is just not where it needs to be. The use of yellow and bright green feels very “trade”. And the exclusion of VAT, the chunky typography and the heavy use of dark grey/ black just further intensifies that.

Now that’s not to say that it should be all skippy and girly. Cath Kidston is just a proportion of what Harvey Maria do. Their tagline is fabulous floors, and the floors are truly fabulous! From the brights in the Colours Collection to the tasteful woods and stunning leather collection.

Structurally the site is busy, complicated and doesn’t guide visitors around as effectively as it might.

The brief for the new website is to make the site more engaging, more user friendly and encourage visitors to order samples. The company is on a mission to grow – significantly over the next twelve months or so. They are exploring some exciting design collaborations as well as a strong retail platform and they need a website that reflects both the quality of their product and their customer base.

Our goal is to create a design that is strong, elegant and exciting. We want to clean up the layout, encourage people to take some very specific actions and also to create a site that is socially more powerful. It’s about creating an experience, encouraging people to interact and creating a much stronger brand.

I’ll be sharing our wireframes for the site next week, and once we’ve had some feedback on the creative, I’ll also post that very soon…

Have a wonderful weekend!

Tagged as in Branding, Graphic Design

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Tagged as , Photoshop tutorial in Blogging, Graphic Design, Tutorials

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Tagged as , engaging ecommerce design, joules, powerful ecommerce in Branding, Graphic Design, Inspirations, Powerful Ecommerce, Web Design, Websites