Ingeniously authentic
Founded on ingenuity and irreverence, the Duluth brand uses illustration and stories from the field to promote their products. A wealth of content and prime seat on top a porcelain throne as the bathroom reading of choice do not, however, sell pants. Planet Propaganda and I were brought in to codify a design system, apply a user-centered approach to merchandising, and sharpen the richness of the brand.
Applying a method to the madness
Reigning in an unregulated design palette, while celebrating and elevating the spirit of the brand required a delicate balance of trimming the fat without losing the feast. I created a system of five different spread types, working a range of expressive-to-utilitarian to account for rhythmic story-telling and the various merchandising needs. Knockout was introduced as the master headline type, which is such a large family that we were able to establish some unity while still being totally expressive. I created a palette of shapes (like the pocket-shape for product color options) were developed, along with flexible ingenious feature boxes to call out product features.
Also available online!
In addition to updating the design system for the catalog, we updated the UX and UI of their increasingly important e-commerce site. Care was taken to design a pleasing customer experience for a digital retail environment that supports complex products without any photography.
Another challenge was how to maintain the spirit of story-telling on a digital experience that needs to be optimized to support ease of transactions.
Our solution was to make the product discovery, navigation and purchase super straightforward, and create special forums for … Trade Panel Picks, … pull in illustration where we could on full width banners, and even created a something microsite that travelled the length of the popular firehose pants, calling out features and the relevant stories.
And now with feeling!
With storytelling at the heart of the brand, it should come as no surprise that it was an absolute blast to get to make multi-frame banner ads. I worked on the concepts, storyboards, design and production of the banner suites.
Our strategy was to show improbable challenges feats of
Character illustration, animation, and foundational concept created by the incomparable Nate Theis.
