In redesigning the user experience and brand identity for Vancouver Fashion Week’s main webpage, I held a key role in the final concept development in articulating the branding and creative direction.
| Team | |
|---|---|
| Linda Liu | product development; creative design; client communications |
| Rebecca Lu | project management; copywriting |
| Danny Lee | proof-reading |
| Michael Su | copywriting |
| client | Vancouver Fashion Week |
Vancouver Fashion Week showcases emerging fashion designers, bringing global and local talent together to the international hub of Downtown Vancouver bi-annually for one week of fashion celebration.
In adapting to digital formats, their shows have downscaled to 3 days of 1.5 hour runway livestreams and lost a significant portion of their audience engagement, particularly from audiences who are not from traditional fashion institutions.
How might Vancouver Fashion Week increase engagement from creative audiences of non-fashion backgrounds?
Our team conducted several rounds of research totalling around 30 survey participants, 8 interviews, and 2 virtual workshops with Vancouver Fashion Week and prospective audiences. The following summarizes two key insights from our data gathering.
insight 1
Vancouver Fashion Week’s target audience, the non-fashion creatives, seek more paid opportunities.
insight 2
Vancouver Fashion Week's online platforms received lacklustre impressions from audiences.
Social media and websites are generally the first platforms creatives will look for when discovering fashion communities. However, the lack of a consistent visual identity created confusing and off-putting brand signals -- discouraging creatives form further participation with Vancouver Fashion Week.
social media guide-book
| my role | social media analysis |
Based on our gathered insights, I analyzed VFW’s social media content and produced a guide which included critique ranging from influencer collaborations, copywriting, and new content proposals.
Although producing a critique of VFW’s Instagram was helpful in our research, it was not our team’s role to become the managers of Vancouver Fashion Week’s social media, therefore a critique on its own was not a sustainable design concept.
The importance of providing a product that VFW could continue to use, even after our leave from the project, became our focus.
creator's hub
| my role | visual product design |
Our team developed one idea proposed in our critique, gig-callouts, and evolved it into a robust guide for how VFW might implement a creator’s hub: a platform for spotlighting creatives, job postings, and sharing local events and networking opportunities that runs in conjunction with fashion week.
While my team members were ready to develop this as the final concept, I could not shake two unresolved questions: Why should it be Vancouver Fashion Week, an event organizer, to adopt a creator’s hub? And why would a creative enlist in Vancouver Fashion Week’s creator’s hub over other services or resources available to them?
It concerned me that to fulfill the creative audiences’ goals, our team proposed VFW to bend-over-backwards into a role that was not its original inception.
Just because the target audience has certain goals, it does not mean that our product must become the audience’s desired solution. The product may instead be merely a stepping-stone towards the audience’s end goal, while still aligning with Vancouver Fashion Week’s core operations.
VFW website, UX and branding redesign
| my role | visual direction and branding |
After presenting my former thought processes to my team, we agreed to pursue a UX/UI and branding redesign of Vancouver Fashion Week’s main webpage as our final product concept.
Creatives seek paid work, and part of what leads creatives to paid work is networking opportunities. Therefore, Vancouver Fashion Week needs only to demonstrate their event as a superior destination for that purpose to drive the audience’s participation. The website, which is usually the first point of interaction a new audience has with the Vancouver Fashion Week brand, requires a strong visual identity and sense of community in order to succeed on this regard.
For non-fashion creatives who are motivated to learn more about Vancouver’s fashion scene, show that VFW is a superior destination for fashion discovery, driving their participation in digital fashion week.
Accomplishing this requires a visual identity for VFW that represents the fashion talent in their comunity, and a sense of community in VFW’s digital spaces.
