Ingeniously authentic
Founded on ingenuity and irreverence, the Duluth brand uses illustration and stories from the field to promote their products. Planet Propaganda and I were brought in to codify a design system, apply a user-centered approach to merchandising, without losing the richness of the brand.
Applying a method to the madness
Reigning in an unregulated design palette, while celebrating and elevating the spirit of the brand required a delicate balance of trimming the fat without losing the feast. I created a system of five different spread types, in a range of expressive-to-utilitarian, to account for rhythmic story-telling and the various merchandising needs. Knockout was introduced as the master headline type. Since it is such a large type family we were able to establish unity while still being expressive. A palette of shapes (like the pocket-shape for product color options) were developed, along with flexible ingenious feature boxes to consistently call out product features.
Also available online!
In addition to updating the design system for the catalog, we updated the UX and UI of their increasingly important e-commerce site. Care was taken to design a pleasing customer experience for a digital retail environment that supports complex products without any photography.
An additional challenge was maintaining the spirit of story-telling on a digital experience that is optimized to support ease of transactions.
Our solution was to make the product discovery, navigation and purchase super straightforward, and create special story-telling moments such as our Trade Panel Picks, or microsites, where we got really focused on the creative.
Once more with feeling!
Animated banner ads were another way we brough humor and product stories alive. I worked on concepts, storyboards, design and production of the ad suites. Character illustration, animation and story-arch by the incomparable Nate Theis.
