Crafting a Seamless Journey Through Design, Storytelling, and Trailblazing Narratives
By Quinn Brasel
A New Digital Presence
As we prepare to wrap up 2023, our goal is to enter 2024 on a freshly inspired note. In keeping with that theme, we recently unveiled our new website and wanted to share the process as we've spent the last few months redesigning it from the ground up.
Our original website provided us with a solid foundation, however we wanted to challenge ourselves to elaborate on the ways in which we could showcase our unique process and storytelling with clients. Most notably, we’ve expanded our services to include brand storytelling for media + marketing.
Low Fidelity Wireframes
Trust the Process
At the forefront of our redesign priorities was to dedicate an entire page detailing our design process. Our goal is to take our collaborators and partners on a journey with us, and provide guidance and strategy along the way.
As we live in the outdoor industry, and we are hired as guides for the product development process, we chose to create a visual representation of this using an ascent route map to display the steps we will journey on together, either in the product design or the media realm.
Not to be missed is the newest service we offer; Media and Storytelling. We recognize each brand that we work with has a unique, compelling journey, and it’s easy to lose the narrative when getting to the launch finish line. This is why we highlighted three main categories of the process: Strategy, Creation and Distribution. Whether it’s redesigning a partner’s website or collaborating on photoshoots to have content for social media, we’re opening up the floor for more digital marketing opportunities.
Finally, we intentionally designed the images on this page to exemplify each specific stage of the process. Words can only describe so much, but pulling from our archive of images to showcase a hands-on journey is much more impactful, not to mention they provide insight into industry terms clients might not be familiar with.
The journey of the "Process" page design
Trailblazing Narratives
The Case Study pages are where we took every liberty to dive into each client’s journey in more depth. From a hunting brand dreamt up in a small town in Wisconsin, to an iconic brand looking to explode onto the fly fishing market, we’ve been privy to seeing many starting points and stages.
Instead of just going with a typical “ intro/challenge/solution” framework, we tailored it to the experience we had with each client and our actual process. By structuring it this way, we felt confident there was no part of the journey skimmed over or forgotten about.
After brainstorming a few different formats, including a visual journey + timeline for each client's process, the final framework ended up being:
Introduction
Collaboration
The Goal
The Challenge
Approach
Our Process
Results
Where they are now
Although we love describing the journey and steps along the way, it's only human nature to want to see the final product ( the result of months, sometimes years of ideation and work). This is why we dedicated a gallery at the bottom of each case study page to the final collection.
Our goal was to provide context in the form of the story and photos of the entire process, so that the gallery was a cumulative reflection of the work done by the entire team.
Using Figma to ideate on the case study page design process
It’s Not Really About Us
When looking at the "About Us" page on most websites, you'll most likely find a collection of black and white headshots with the standard names, titles, a few genuine smiles and a few pained ones. That's not exactly our vibe and not genuine for us, so instead we designed a cascading, seamless page with pictures of WERX “in the field”, in every sense of the word.
The goal was to show the WERX team in their element, whether it’s looking out over a sea of alpine peaks, studiously focusing at a sewing machine or shooting products in the studio… it’s the real us (yes, we did also include one black and white team photo).
In a similar vein, we want those who work with us to get the full experience. This includes access to our Fort Collins design studio. We decided to feature this on the About page as well with visuals of real collaborations and work being done in-house.
Designing for Today
At the end of the day, we are designers at heart and felt it would be valuable to share our own design journey with the website. Moving forward with the mindset that it’s a “living” platform, we can’t wait to continue adding case studies and new content as we complete new projects in 2024.
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