A design sprint for the mother
of contemporary dystopia
Margaret
Atwood
Discipline:
User Experience
User Interface
Brand Strategy
Marketing Strategy
Art Direction
Date:
2018
Duration:
2 days
Margaret Atwood is on the foremost authors of our time; coined as the mother of contemporary dystopian fiction. Best known for her novels the "Handmaid's Tale" and "Alias Grace" Atwood has been hailed as a master feminist author who writings have been seen as almost prophetic. In order to match her elevated writing style, I worked to refresh her website to make it both functional and create a consistent and elegant look and feel.
The Challenges
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Extreme sigularity
-
Very difficult to navigate
-
Lack of Information architecture
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Dated look and feel
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Lack of insight on content
Sleek design for modularity
When approaching this design sprint the
clearest issue faced with the current site
was the extreme lack of information design
leading to a number of other problems.
Keeping this in mind I designed with a modular
approach as a solution. I experimented with two
distinct style but moved forward with a more
elevated and simple approach to the design,
A focus on type
With a writer being the focus of the challenge I
focused on developing a clean, yet elevated
approach to typography. Experiementing to
find the right fit for the look and feel for her
and her writings.
Understanding information
With such large amounts of type and information
being a focus I wanted to design with content in
mind and build a system that was both elegant
and adaptable to fluctuating content and media.
Bringing it all together
After digging into content and information the final
designs are both engaging and elevated. The grid
system allows content to move and shift and new
media to easily format across the site.
Aggregating content
through related themes
Added eccom functionality
Easily updatable content through modular design
Engaging the user
With such large amounts of type and information
being a focus I wanted to design with content in
mind and build a system that was both elegant
and adaptable to fluctuating content and media.
Home
The Home page is an aggregate of all current and up to date information for Atwood and her literature, media, and more. Here you can find content relevant to her work on shows like "Handmaid's Tale" learn about her process and find other popular works she has written by context.
Writings
The Writings organizes her work from novels, to lecture, short stories, and poems. Here you can find her complete bibliography, excerpts, novels, and search via writing category.
Book detail & purchase
Finally you can see details of books and purchase them through the website which is a much needed improvement. You can find additional writings based on the themes of the viewed book, reviews, excerpts, and media related to the topic.
The final outcomes
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Best practices in content management
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Developed a modular system to handle data and dynamic content
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Created a clean and elevated design in 2 days
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Added eccom capabilities for easy buy in for users
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seamlessly integrated content across the site based on context
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