Going overboard and never had more fun.
Overview: Was tasked to “design a Product Catalog (for tablets)” for “any existing company.” We were told to work within their brand’s style and guidelines and to not use Ipsum and placeholder text, but to either write our own or use assets and text that they already had.
My Personal Goal: I really wanted to go for it with this assignment. Obviously, I wouldn’t have tons of time with this being for school, but I really wanted to push myself and do something I was really proud to do.
The original design was pretty uninspiring to me. Nikon implements some amazing design choices in some places on their site, but I redesigned everything for Tablet and tried to keep more of a uniform design across the board.
They do a really good job on their more “featured” cameras and equipment and honestly, couldn’t do better myself on some of those pages. This quality and effort, however, is missing on most other pages and it would be great to see the love getting thrown and some of the “cheaper” or “older” models as well.
The Design Process
Minimalism, even though its trending, might not always be the best decision.
Sketches
I decided to sketch out some ideas that I had to maybe improve the design, or at very least, modernize it and bring ALL of the content to have a more uniform feel while still not slacking on quality.
These sketches kind of laid out a general idea of what I wanted.
I did, however, decide to change it after going through some early mockups because it felt like I was straying away from my goal and was making it too minimal and simple.
I really wanted to go all out on this project.
Bending the Rules and Getting Feedback
The assignment description clearly stated that we were to use the brand’s style and guidelines, but I found that when designing it lacked something. Color. Nikon is famous for its black and yellow but I couldn’t just do it all in black and yellow. I decided to add Purple and greys to add some variety and passed it to the class to get feedback.
I don’t know if it was against the rules of it going outside and grabbing more color and some different font choices (kept the main font as close to an original as possible).
Turns out, a lot of the class agreed with me and so I decided to stick with the purple in a lot of the design.
Full Send
After I got my flow down, and what I wanted to do, I decided to full-on go for it. My final finished product ended up being over 80 artboards long and I was really happy with how it turned out. Obviously, there are some things with Adobe XD that limits what you can do on it, but overall I feel like the general idea of some of the interactive elements made it across and was very happy with it in the end.
Go overboard! It's worth it! You will feel much more accomplished!
Prototype Link: https://xd.adobe.com/view/15d092b7-bfe4-4bbb-9882-db188f4d223d-4083/
P.S. File and layer management were on point as well. That alone is a “Win” in my book.
