Design a responsive online platform for a magazine, newspaper or blog directed to meet the needs and goals of the presented User Persona. Alexandra Linortner and I had 5 days to design something from scratch!

We used a lot of different tools to stay organized and handling time-management. To name a few:

- Time-management with KanBan Board in Trello

- Interviews

- Competitors Analysis

- Brainstorming

- Moodboard

- Card Sorting

- User Flow

- Lo-fi Sketches

- Mid-fi Wireframes

- Hi-fi Wireframes in Figma for collaboration purposes

- Style Tile

- Prototyping in Principle

We started with qualitative research with interviews as we were given a persona in the brief. We had to adjust our persona a little bit due to our interview outcomes.

Paula is a 25-year old graphic designer who wants to be an artist.

Reads Kinfolk, OPENHOUSE MAGAZINE, and WEPRESENT Magazine.

Goals: get inspired, be informed about trends in the art scene.

Once the Persona was defined, we dived deep into the competitors' analysis. Hours passed by comparing the visual elements of our competitors. We looked very closely at the details of the design, states of buttons, hover over effects, scrolling effects to find the best possible solution for our design.

By doing so, we collected our ideas and inspirations in a mood board and came up with the following brand attributes:

Our online magazine is minimalistic, honest, inspirational BUT never cluttered.

Our brand attributes helped us a lot to make decisions during the design process. Minimalistic design elements give the users a feeling of clarity within the creative chaos in their heads. The honest imagery provides an authentic insight into the artist's lives.

The next step in the process was to find a suitable name for our online magazine which represents our vision and our brand attributes. As Sweden is well known for it’s simple and minimalist designs, we decided to choose a Swedish word for our brand name. Our aim is to bring the user closer to the artist and their art — kind of like providing an insight into the artist's life. We came up with the following:

The brand name is set, no time to loose to start the ideation phase. Firstly we sketched our ideas onto lo-fi wireframes preventing wasting time on not-suitable ideas. This helped immensely to decide on a final design. For collaboration purposes, we decided to work in Figma over Sketch. Figma allowed us to work on our mid-fi and hi-fi prototypes simultaneously which made the process a lot easier than sharing Sketch files. The picture below illustrates two ways of how we imagined our inspirational site could look like.

After we finalized our mid-fi wireframes, we collected feedback from our users. Even though this week's project was UI focused, testing is vital in order to create a successful product. Our Users approved our ideas and the hi-fi design part started. We finalized our hi-fi prototype in Principle so that animations could be implemented.

We collected the most important elements on our style tile which made us realize that we did a good job in sticking to the minimalistic approach that we were aiming for.

The biggest takeaways from this project are:

- UX/UI collaboration tools like Figma are amazing when you have to work on a project simultaneously.

- Even small animations that might go unnoticed, take some time to implement.

- Keeping a minimalistic design, without it being boring is harder than expected.