We understand that not all of our brand advocates need our services, but would like to support our team and our mission. Also as a team we create a lot of cool stuff that we would like to share to the world. We decided to create our own Adept Creative agency store.
I would like to take you along through our taught process as we design an ecommerce store for our agency.
Setting our Goals
Setting our goals for the new shop was easy. We wanted to showcase our creative art while showing our love for our homebase city, Cleveland, Ohio.
As for the technical needs it needed to be integrated with a print on demand service.
The First Designs
We decided to focus on designing an original series of logo lockups based on 3 northwest neighborhoods of Cleveland. Next step would be to select product offerings and design the apparel.
Step 1 Gather inspiration
Adept Creative reallocated to the westside of Cleveland in 2017, after providing marketing and branding services from nearby Akron, Ohio. “Since then it has been wonderful getting to know these vibrant communities living and working in Gordon Square.
The first step is to develop a framework of which you use to create future designs.
I like to use a non standard rectangle artboard in Adobe Illustrator. I set up my folders and I just go searching. Pulling in anything that calls to me photos, typefaces, posters, I take colors from images and compile groupings of typographical sets. And put it on this artboard as a reference, a stylescape.
Why is this important?
It is an important part of the client communication and collaboration process. It allows us to agree upon a direction or style to take all marketing deliverables.
Step 2 Sketch
“I believe it is important to us a quick and highly iterative process when developing a creative framework.” -Mike Robinson
Aside from the stylescaping process I like to start every creative project as organically as possible.
One of them is by using a pencil and notebook to do timed sketch sprints.
Link:other organic frameworks
Step 3 Refine
We then take those sketch images and digitize them. We refine the lines, experiment with different applications and finalize them that provides the highest quality format.
The Result
So here we are… We featured some local graffiti artwork in the hero section. The first section includes latest product listings. We then scroll through the featured Cleveland Neighborhood collections.
The bottom of the page shows a black and white skyline of Cleveland, Ohio and a colorful call to action section including links, bio, contact details and a contact forum to sign up for some drip email.
We now have a rough yet interactive first design.
Next up product design.
