Design brief with The Bronze Jug Company
Welcome to one of my side projects. If you've followed my previous work you'll know that I'm doing a lot of design challenges from a page called Sharpen Design to improve my design skills. While Sharpen Design is amazing for smaller design challenges like creating landing pages, contact forms, etc. I needed something more.
I stumbled upon a website called goodbrief.io, which is a design brief generator. You start by putting in which type of work you want to do, e.g. website, logo, brand identity etc., and then you pick the industry you'd like to work with, e.g. fashion, travel, food, sports etc. After that it gives you a design brief like this - let me take you through The Bronze Jug Company design brief!
The Company Name
The Bronze Jug Company.
Company description
We are a company that makes high-performance surfboards with an emphasis on performance. Our target audience is millennials.
We want to convey a sense of excitement, while at the same time being fresh.
We want to convey a sense of excitement, while at the same time being fresh.
Job description
You must create a website that will mainly make it easy to contact the company.
The goal is to emphasize the brand's values. Besides the landing page, the website will need a contact page, product pages and a privacy policy page. The landing page should have a Contact Us section. There should be a call to action to get users to subscribe to the newsletter.
They would prefer a minimal design, and would like you to use the brand color, which is yellow. Take into account the client's preferences and values.
The goal is to emphasize the brand's values. Besides the landing page, the website will need a contact page, product pages and a privacy policy page. The landing page should have a Contact Us section. There should be a call to action to get users to subscribe to the newsletter.
They would prefer a minimal design, and would like you to use the brand color, which is yellow. Take into account the client's preferences and values.
Key Notes
From here you can jump straight into the design stage, but I like to make the text above into a kind of checklist, so that I can check off the things that I need to implement into the design.
For example:
- Must be easy to contact the company
- Product must include four 'pages.
- Landing page, including a contact us and subscribe CTA.
- Contact page.
- Product page.
- Privacy policy page.
- Minimalistic design.
- Primary and brand color is yellow.
Now, we can jump straight into the design process.
Designing The Bronze Jug Website
The first page you run into when visiting the website is a big hero image of a guy surfing. This guy is a young and adventurous guy who reflects the Bronze Jugs main target group.
Adding a big font, all-cap title to the front page is adding some excitement to the first impression. The main goal of all the customers are to ride the waves, which is why I chose it to the be slogan of the website.
The client asked for two specific CTA's on the landing page. A contact us and a subscription section. I chose the standard top-right CTA for the contact us in a bright yellow that should resemble the company colors. For the subscription section, I decided to use the space underneath the title with a simple input field for easy sign-up process.
The main function of the website is to make it easy for customers to contact the website which is why the contact us CTA is slightly bigger and more visible than the subscribe one.
The Bronze Jug Product Page
There is a lot of text on the product page. Even though the client asked for a minimalistic design, when making customizable products there are a lot of option to choose from.
On this page the customer will run into a section informing them about how it works when building a custom board, as well as an ETA on delivery depending on what they choose below.
After reading the text they can easily scroll down to the building part of the page. Here, they'll get to make their first decision - picking out their skill level: Beginner, intermediate, advanced, pro. Giving them the option to pick themselves and also indirectly motivating them, saying that we all start somewhere - hopefully, making them more comfortable.
After picking their level they'll be able to see one of the stock board that the Bronze Jug offers. They'll be able to read a quick description and immediately be able to customize everything from the dimensions, construction, fin-plugs, color and adding text/images to the final product (I must admit I stole some of them from another site, because I know nothing about surfboards)...
At the end the customer will always be able to see the current and final price, they'll be able to cancel the order and/or contact the company if needed.
The Privacy Policy Page
Nowadays, it's important to inform your customers on their privacy and how companies use their personal information. The Bronze Jug has a link in the top navigation called 'Your Privacy' and I chose this because I feel like it's such an important part of a company.
On this page the customer will be able to read about which information is collected, how it's used and who it's being shared with.
How To Contact The Bronze Jug
It's super important that your customers can easily contact you. Besides from having the e-mail, address and phone number in the footer of each page (except for the landing page), I decided to create a pop-up contact page.
This way it's always easy for the customer to pop-up the contact section if they need help. Making it a pop-up was based on it being the main problem that I had to solve for the Bronze Jug - also, this way the customer doesn't have to go to another page, e.g. if they're on the product page and they click the contact us CTA, they'll just open a pop-up while they're still on the current page.
This pop-up is probably the most minimalistic section on the page, but it's super helpful. Below you'll see how the section looks by itself and how it looks when it's opened up on the website.
Challenge Goal
Obviously, the goal of this challenge is to practice making full websites. I decided to go with the Bronze Jug because of the product and the feel they wanted on their website. It's amazing trying to come up with a solution on a product you know nothing about - which probably will happen in the future when I run into "real" projects.
Other than that trying to implement all the demands from the client was a bit of a challenge because I've never created a privacy policy page before.
Challenge retrospective
I'm quite happy with the result. There are a few things I wanted to re-do when looking back. I think I would've made sure to have the Privacy Policy Page linked at the bottom of the landing page and in the footer section on each page and instead have a FAQ page linked at the top navigation.
The design brief gave me 6 days to complete the challenge, but I've been working on this for about 2,5 days - on and off - and I'm quite happy about it. For future projects I want to implement my sketches and my entire thought process behind every single choice I've made while creating the design.
I'd love to connect with you!
While I'm doing these challenges I'm slowly creating my own portfolio website, but I'd love to connect with each and everyone of you on different platforms.
I'm a big fan of LinkedIn and if you feel like I'd be a fit for your network, then please feel free to add me - link is right here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rasmusbakkristensen/
I appreciate you stopping by - take care,
Rasmus Bak
