For my final year project, I created the branding, social content and website for a clothing company created by a fellow student.
Project Brief
Over the last few years, there have been many urban brands that have been created in the UK and gone on to become very successful businesses, examples of this include Trapstar, Maniere de Voir and Playdot Apparel. Flux de Courant intends to be the next in this line of success and to do that they must first establish a fan base and get their presence known to the public. A brief was created by the client outlining what they intended to do with the brand and how they could use digital media to appeal to the public.
The brief aimed to create a website that will show off and promote the brand, and also allow them to buy products, or get in contact with someone who they can buy from. While not being a key requirement from the client, making the website responsive was something that we discussed and agreed that it would be beneficial. As well as this the other main requirement of this project was that the social media for the brand needed to be created and developed.
Planning Design & Research
When planning and researching how to create the branding and website for the brand, I first looked at similar companies in order to gain a greater understanding of how to successfully create a strong brand identity and identify strong and weak points in similar brands. The four brands I looked at were Trapstar, Maniere De Voir, PlayDot Apparel and Wonders of the Seven. I researched their campaign strategies, how they market themselves and how they have designed and presented their social media pages and websites.
Once I had done my research into existing brands, and noticed what made them appealing/what they lacked I then created some initial designs for the website and sent them out to different people who fit into the brands’ target audience to collect feedback. I then revised the design based on the responses and started to implement what I had learned.
Creation
All content on the website was created by me, including the images on the website pages. I used a Nikon D3200 DSLR to take the photos for the photoshoot and then edited them using Photoshop to create assets such as the hero banner on the website.
The website itself was built using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP & MySQL. I created a database to store user details and create a shopping function and I also used Bootstrap to help make the website responsive as many people in the target audience said they would mostly use their phones for online shopping so making sure the website supported mobile screens was a key priority.
Conclusion
I feel that choosing this project was worthwhile and over the duration of this project I advanced my skills in web development. If I were to do this project knowing what I know now, I would try to implement more frameworks and different technologies as this is something I am more capable of now, I would also create it on a dedicated web server so that all functions would work as expected.