About tHE vera project

This project took place over the span of 4 months, in which I revived a dated looking brand for the hosting company, Hostwinds. This re-brand included creating a new website complete with high fidelity prototypes. Creating new iconography and even some apparel design for cool company branded gear. The challenges for this project were:
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1. Identify the primary demographics of our users.
2. Create a website that is cleanly designed and easy to use that doesn't feel like it was built in 2003.
3. Create a personality to go with the new brand aesthetic.

Deliverables

  • High Fidelity Mockups
  • Icons
  • Apparel Design
  • Front-End HTML/CSS

Skills/Tools

  • Photoshop
  • Illustrator
  • IInVision
  • Bootstrap 4
  • LESS

Who is Hostwinds?

The original color scheme for Hostwinds would probably make you think the primary demographic of users was in their late 60s. The color scheme was all pale gray and soft blue, with oversized icons and fonts. A look at Google Analytics showed us quite the opposite, it was a much younger demographic on average between 20s and 30s and with a huge base of users out of both Africa and Asia. The important take aways from this data was that our site needed to appeal to a much younger crowd and we definitely needed to do some localization for regions we were more priminentin.

I ended up making some isometric icons on a blue gradient to test out some colors and aesthetic that I thought might work for our primary demographic. These ended up not being party of the final design, but we kept the color scheme.

Apparel Design

This was a completely new endevor for me, having never designed apparel before. I got to have a lot of fun with this project, and work with the printers to create fun and unique apparel for Hostwinds. Below I have pictured the apparel mockups and me modeling one of the final products excitedly, after our shipment arrived.

Hostwinds.com

The final part of this rebrand was to create and code a web page to tie the new aesthetic together and create advertisements to draw people in to get a look at the new Hostwinds. This project was done using Bootstrap 4 and LESS - this included creating a style guildeline and class system for the new homepage. In previous iterations of the website, they had been using vanilla CSS, so the transition to a compiled style sheet took some work. To see the full site, visit hostwinds.com.

Creating Advertisements

After the branding was done I wanted to create some advertisements in order to get some folks on the site to take a look at the new image. Fortunately for me this happend around the time of black Friday (In case you are wondering why some of the ads are holiday themed). I took this as an opportunity to create a personality to go with our brand. After spending several hours looking at analtyics and finding out who our primary demographic was, I decided to create ads aimed at a younger crowd of tech-savvy individuals who enjoy bad puns.