Designing for responsive, scale and place
FINDING A WAY TO TEMPLATE RESPONSIVE
OWNED THE DESIGN PROCESS
Front beginning to end, I was part of the entire design process as lead design.
DESIGNED RESPONSIVE TEMPLATES
I designed a responsive template to map onto CF’s 10+ corporate real estate sites.
ITERATED WITH CLIENTS
My initiative and art direction delighted the client and helped continue our business with them.
SapientNitro had just rebranded the Cadillac Fairview retail sites in a responsive template that could be applied across all their malls, such as Toronto Eaton’s Center and Markville Mall. Cadillac Fairview was also going to rebrand their corporate branding to match the redesign. This left the Cadillac Fairview corporate brand and corporate real estate website behind.
They needed to update their corporate site that aligned with the retail sites as well as align with their new corporate logo. So they reached out to SapientNitro again to take a look.
Gathering requirements
First we had to familiarize ourselves with the new branding and simultaneously conduct a full audit of CF’s webpages and how they map out. This way we could figure out how many templates we needed to create. While looking at the brand guidelines for the CF branding, I was also helping to capture screenshots of the old website.
Taking a look at the old corporate site and all the different pages that would be required to be templated.
Mapping UX
While at Sapient, I was able to do some of the UX alongside the UX designer on the project and get client sign off.
Recognizing restraints and finding the positive
Cadillac Fairview didn’t want to make a snazzy site as much as a refresh. Their requirements was no new stock photo and just a new website to match the rebrand of their brand identity.
What I found was that there was already a rich stock of original photography that we could leverage. If we use existing assets of their ACTUAL properties, it would save clients money and the photos were perfect to highlight their individual properties.
I showed a moodboard of existing CF photography with a custom filter to maintain brand consistency….and the stakeholders loved it.
The final design
We had about 12 different real estate properties with various pages that had shared content. But we still wanted to improve discoverability and increase web traffic. So I applied a tiled approach to the landing page that could match the feature pages that were common across the sites.
The grid was also scalable for small screen sizes which clients were also happy about. We were able to accommodate their large navigation pattern plus the templated grid within the time frame for delivery.
The results
Clients were extremely satisfied with the delivery in terms of work and scale. They understood how design was able to bring about a cohesive feel to their individual properties and realize they didn’t need to pay for more assets when they could leverage what they had.
It also brought about efficiencies on Sapient’s end, because we were able to just retouch 45 assets and drop them into templates.