Working with ISOKO started by me responding to an insta story in an open call for designers from Alexandre Souêtre (a personal fav creative of mine). I think this is the first time I've ever done that, but it worked out quite nicely. I was brought on to expand upon the initial brand work done by Alex, to promote the beautiful products developed by Oghale Alex and his business partners. So basically.. Alex created an awesome and minimal brand, and I had the best assets to work with. EZ.
While the design work I did in blending the two together was pretty easy given what I had at my disposal, the development.. not so much. I really wanted this to be buttoned up and capture the calm essence of the brand. That meant slowing things down, and being as precise as possible. I'm proud of what I was able to pull off, and was definitely a project I learned a lot on
With the bulk of the brand recently created by Alex and Ogahle, there wasn't a ton of space to play. I feel like there was some room to embrace a more editorial applciation that feels appropriate for brands that exist somewhere in the fashion to high fashion realm. Also, the core tenant of the brand (and tagline) is the idea of connecting to calm, so clearly a sense of calm and openness was going to need to be immediately apparent across the board.
To kick off the design process, I primarily worked through static comps to help iterate quickly and hone in on the proper application/evolution of the brand. It honestly didn't take all that much back and forth, but once we were established on a path, the more interior pages were primarily designed in Webflow. This was initially to rough out content flow, and start connecting/creating known CMS data points... but this slowly evolved into full-fledged designing within webflow. With this pivot, we were able to evaluate things in browser with final functionality which was helpful since an abstract feeling of 'calmness' in interacting with the site is very hard to convey in static comps. While quick motion studies could have also conveyed, Webflow is interactive and at this point quicker for me to prototype within.
A good portion of exploration was focused around potential story-telling, and thus editorial layouts all over the place. While they didn't end up being as present in the final site as I inferred there would be, it was a good exercise to feel out the brand regardless.