The owners wanted a site design that was clean, simple to navigate, fun, and of course resembled colors within their shop - wood.
Within their niche, so many of their competitors took a similar approach. They all have lots of browns and blacks that pull you into a sea of sadness.
I looked elsewhere for color inspiration. The world in which they source their beautiful wood slabs and the modern homes they liven up.
For this brand, I began with the color palette. Rather than using the muted tans and browns, I opted for light grey, charcoal, a near white tan, and a sage green. These color choices were to play to the natural beauty behind the brand. At HW, their team focuses on ethically sourced lumber, natural live edges, and a natural finish that is sourced responsibly.
They wanted to keep the brand light and fun, this is where the illustrations come into play. I've opted for a lumber jack approach due to their locale in Minnesota. Everyone knows Paul Bunyan is the best (or most famous) lumber jack. These illustrations create fun backgrounds that are subtle and don't pull from the galleries.
For the logo, they wanted to pull focus to the handmade aspect of their products. I felt the hand planer was the best way to communicate handmade beauty.
As they don't have a store front, the large majority of their customers come from social media and their website. Having a clean user experience and mobile optimized site was top priority.
In addition to these priorities, the nature of their work is custom. So it was equally important to showcase their work in an easy to find and easy to call out fashion.
The light backdrops make it simple to display all variations of their work beautifully without any color conflicts. I made sure to create four pages dedicated to the most popular areas of their work, and within each page a dedicated gallery that has common call outs to click on, so you may see the specific items in a lightbox.
UX Design: User experience (UX) design is the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users.
