Amarna

Website Design | UX Research | Branding

Creating A High Fashion Brand With A Big Heart

Amana is a brand new fashion brand based outside of Los Angeles. The company is very active with their mission of spreading positivity and love throughout the world. They have two main campaigns. One, where they do percentage based donations for impoverished areas and another where they gift a t-shirt to their customers to promote a gift giving culture. The company was founded by a young Japanese American named Yuki Izoe who wanted to spread the message of how one person can create a positive impact in the world. Our mission? Help Yuki launch her brand website, start building awareness for her clothing line, and create interest in her social activism causes.

Creating A High Fashion Brand With A Big Heart

Amana is a brand new fashion brand based outside of Los Angeles. The company is very active with their mission of spreading positivity and love throughout the world. They have two main campaigns. One, where they do percentage based donations for impoverished areas and another where they gift a t-shirt to their customers to promote a gift giving culture. The company was founded by a young Japanese American named Yuki Izoe who wanted to spread the message of how one person can create a positive impact in the world. Our mission? Help Yuki launch her brand website, start building awareness for her clothing line, and create interest in her social activism causes.

The Challenge

Create a new brand based on positivity

Outcome

We launched a new website, helped Yuki finish her brand message, and created content for a targeted user base

User Research

Developing the strategy

We knew the brand message and after talking to the founder, we had a better idea of the direction we wanted to go from here. The first step organizing the ideas she gave us into a coherent brief. This involved taking information spread out through various Google documents and organizing them into one main document.

Follow this link if you want to read the full documentation:

Redesigning The Logo

Sprucing up the current logo

The original logo had a majestic regal appearance. The logo was strong, but we felt that for its web presence the gradient wouldn’t work to its full potential on the store’s website. We went through a coupe of iterations until realizing that sometimes, less is indeed more, and decided to go for a simpler black version of the logo. We came to this conclusion after observing how subdued most other high end fashion brands are and their tendency to utilize monochromatic color schemes for their brand.

Of our small sample size of young adults aged 20-30 years old, all five of them agreed that the black logo would work better for web use.

High End Retailers who influenced our decision

As our client was aiming to market towards a higher end brand market, seeing these brands helped to reinforce the idea of us going with a more monochromatic and simple design for the website and brand image.

The original logo had a majestic regal appearance. The logo was strong, but we felt that for itss web presence the gradient wouldn’t work to its full potential on the store’s website. We went through a coupe of iterations until realizing that sometimes, less is indeed more, and decided to go for a simpler black version of the logo. We came to this conclusion after observing how subdued most other high end fashion brands are and their tendency to utilize monochromatic color schemes for their brand.

Of our small sample size of young adults aged 20-30 years old, all five of them agreed that the black logo would work better for web use.

High End Retailers who influenced our decision

As our client was aiming to market towards a higher end brand market, seeing these brands helped to reinforce the idea of us going with a more monochromatic and simple design for the website and brand image.

The User Experience

Building the perfect persona

From the creative brief, we had an idea of where to head with regard to our target market. We organized the general description she gave us for her target audience into a more digestible format. Then we decided to create a persona based on the info organized to humanize our target user and to more effectively design for them. We created two personas, which you can see in more detail below. The personas gave us a frame of reference for how to continue with our next steps and allowed us to get a better idea of our real target audience.

Click the arrows to scroll through the two personas

From these personas were able to identify them into two main groups and outlined their traits into two categories. The two groups were The Empath, which was represented by Jessica and The Trend Follower, which was represented by Dave.

The Empath (Jessica)

  • -Spiritually/Socially Awakened Individuals
  • -Searching for a more meaningful life
  • -Naturally Compassionate/Giving Individuals
  • -Sensitive to concepts such as, “positive vibes”, “love”, and “peace”
  • -Occasionally engaged in volunteer, charity, and donation activities
  • -Social activities or followers of social movements/trends

    • The Trend Follower (Dave)

    • -trend sensitive/followers
    • -they seek admiration from others
    • -they follow influencers on social media and reality tv
    • -they follow their friends/community
    • -financial succcess oriented
    • -they make purchases based on the brand name

      • After working on these two personas, we definitely had a better grasp of the target market. We decided that although our client wanted to market towards both, we believed that the brand recognition required to attract the Dave's would take some time. In light of this knowledge, we decided to mainly focus our efforts on the donations and sense of community that the Amarna brings to the fashion industry.

      Creating a Coming Soon Landing Page

      The Beginnning of the New Website

      We were excited to spread the word about Amarna, but we knew we had some serious work to do before we could launch the full site. We decided to create a landing page to show off a bit of the brand’s style before the official launch date.

      *The Final Coming Soon Landing Page with the Previous Iterations Below

      For these landing soon pages, we weren't sure how trendy our client Yuki wanted the website to look, so we designed two pages with Jessica in mind and two pages with Dave in mind. The two inner pages were designed after some research into other streetwear fashion brands, such as Supreme and Off-White. It was hard imagining the website completely at first, because our client had yet to produce any visible mock-ups of the brand's clothing, so we had to figure out her image by researching current fashion companies.

      Creating The User Journey

      How To Structure The Website

      Once we settled on the landing page, we knew that we had to began the difficult part of deciding on the organization of the website. At this time, we made slight visual decisions, but really focused on how we envisioned the user would interact with The Amarna website.

      We knew that the initial scope of the project would be a three page website with a landing page. So, I built three different wireframe designs. For Designs A and B, I focused more on what I believed “Jessica” our empathetic persona would be interested in and for Design C I designed it thinking about “Dave” our trend-loving user.

      Design A

      Design B

      Design C

      Design A

      This design is bolder than the others, which gives off a fun vibe. It is more common for charity organizations to have this type of layout. There is a lot of room for customization with bold text and images. It should be easy to switch to mobile for this.

      The “our project” page leads into a separate page for each project for a more detailed look than the other website designs.

      One good feature is the Instagram feed that will show tribe members at the bottom of the home page.

      In short for a focus on humanitarian causes and social initiatives, this design may be the best choice.

      Design B

      This design is a little more elegant than the other ones. It has a single pop-up notification for the newsletter and a three page window splash for easy navigation. The design for this is made for a more classic brand image in mind with the text logo at the top of the screen. This is to really showcase the power of the brand later on.

      For a more mature classy brand look, this may be the best choice.

      One thing that is of particular interest is the call-to-action pop up that appears when the page loads. The brand lacks clothing, so I wanted to keep the user engaged with Amarna's content, so that when the products did launch we would have a solid email list to work with for promoting their products.

      You can see the landing page in the two images above with the pop up active and with it closed.

      Design C

      This design is more streetwear influenced than the other websites and it is the trendiest. A lot of the design came from looking at similar streetwear brand websites and incorporating their look. The website has a single footer navigation bar and a call-to-action footer that draws people into following the newsletter.

      If you want a more trendy style brand, which in fashion seems to be leaning towards streetwear and nostalgia, a single page website like this may be the best choice.

      Showing the Client

      Finalizing the User Journey

      The next scope was showing the client the three potential directions we had planned out for Amarna. To do this we changed our initial Sketch files into fully functional Invision prototypes.

      Fortunately, the client decided quickly that they liked the organizational layout for Design A and it was a relatively smooth process.

      We decided from then on it was time to get into the fun part of fleshing out the final website design. To do this we started to work on the visual aspects of the future website by adding in images from Unsplash as placeholders for the eventual product photography made by the company.

      The Visual Design Process

      Presenting Unused Designs

      The Final MVP

      The End Design

      The scope of the project was increasing, so we decided to focus on making a MVP website design. One that we could launch right away to start gaining traction for the Amarna. I decided to strip down everything and made a more subdued approach to color and the design. Eventually, I came up on this three page design and we decided to go through with this for the website launch.

      In the three images below you can see the minimal approach to the design for the final product.