Duchy Originals

An award winning project I developed while Design Director at Story Worldwide.

Story Worldwide were appointed to redesign the Duchy Originals website, I was initially contracted as a consultant to develop the IA but during the course of the project was hired full-time as Design Director.

The previous website was pretty rudimentary so the new design was re-developed from the ground up as part of a more comprehensive online strategy including email, content planning and SEO. Newer, trendier, organic brands were doing a far better job online than the long established Duchy and the brief was to reagin lost ground - both practically in showing the product range, but also by better engaging with their customers and communicating with the organic community in general.

I developed the site information architecture and collaborated with designer Russ Chimes to design the initial concept for the user interface. I subsequently art directed a team of designers lead by Pete Usborne to develop the concept through to launch.

The launch of the site resulted in a 300% boost in traffic and the design went on to win an APA award for best website (no, I'd never heard of APA before either, but still - awards are always nice :o)

Below… The first of two variants on the initial concept design.

Below… A sequence of screenshots to illustrate the animated homepage header area. Selecting one of the three main tabs (or clicking to the right or left of the main image) scrolls the image and tab content to the right or left. Timing is offset to create a slight parallax effect.

An illustrative approach to the main header image was also considered.

A product detail page.

Below… A second variant on the design split the primary navigation into a bar at the top of the page, leaving the sidebar tab with secondary navigation on deeper pages. This is the route that was selected by the client.