A website crafted to show the culture and story of The Old G
I've known The Old G co-founder Peter, since our school days and while we've ended up in different counties, he in America and me in New Zealand we've always loosely kept in touch...
Peter and co-founder, artist, Herbru Brantley set up The Old G as a black minority brand that created a high quality craft gin. Created to give voice to the unrepresented, it embodies culture, legacy, and the spirit of community. Peter approached me to initially develop a new website in webflow based off designs, but after some early discussions, I pitched the idea of doing the design and build myself and bringing his vision for the brand website to life. We had a lot of in depth discussions around usability and while having a graphic heavy site tells the story of the brand it must be useable, sell the the product and engage users.
I worked on sitemaps to visually understand the flow and structure of the site, breaking down each page into sections with ideas for content while Peter worked on the voice of the brand and the type of content needed and expected on the site. Next steps were to start using this content to create some early design mock ups. The site needed to have lots of movement to help engage and entice the user, so this formed part of the consideration when creating a design that would flow and engage interaction. The brand is quite stylised, with imagery being black and white with a noise effects applied and was lucky to have a wide selection of brand graphics to pull from as well as suggesting using brand adverts within the site and short video content looping create intrigue and interest as the user scrolls.
Once happy with the overall concept and the majority of pages designed, I set about the build phase. This was one of the more complex sites I've built with many animations and interactions and complex functionality ( for me anyway) - from shop embeds, store locators and age gates.
While the build took a long time it was a great process creating the movement and subtle interactions that are there to delight and engage the user. I feel like these are the elements that give that point of difference from one website to a professionally designed and built one. One that shows polish and craft.
Despite the different time zones the collaboration process was great with lots of communication and discussions as we went and as the project evolved.
What we delivered was a site that The Old G team can regularly update from.. press releases, news, recipes and community events as well as the ability to expand and grow the site. A site that is set up to be responsive and accessible.
I really enjoyed working on the vast challenges of this project, the creativity of it and creating a site that i believe helps tell the story that The Old G set out to.
