Pepper came to my team with an ask so big other agencies had already declined the work. They needed a brand-new, fully revamped website (plus an uplifted brand identity) before a massive industry conference — and had just 6 weeks to turn the project around.
Pepper is a platform that provides eCommerce and other business solutions for food distributors. Imagine Shopify, but specifically built for the food distribution industry. That’s what Pepper is. The platform caters to individuals who need to conveniently order large quantities of food products, such as 4000 units of ham, without requiring extensive technological expertise.
Pepper serves as a comprehensive replacement for outdated systems that relied on physical notes, phone calls, and cumbersome spreadsheets, providing one centralized solution that loads up on your PC or mobile device.
The Challenge
For this project, my team and I were asked to design a user experience for a customer who doesn’t necessarily know or often think about user experience. We also had a couple of challenges to get around:
The old site failed to convey Pepper’s understanding of their diverse range of product users (for example, sales reps and customer service teams), and it didn’t do a great job of highlighting the platform’s numerous features.
The Pepper team wanted to show that they tailor their solutions to each business’s unique requirements. They needed a website structure that would facilitate easy access to information for distributors, enabling them to gather the necessary details before reaching out to the sales team.
Pepper wanted to underscore their origin as a company specifically designed for food distributors—this meant showing the company’s edge over lots of competitors who try to service other sectors.
Process & Solution
To kickstart the project, I undertook an immersive research process, conducting interviews with the Pepper team to gain a deep understanding of their needs, expectations, and target users.
With this valuable insight in hand, I jumped into the web design phase, while our writing team simultaneously began crafting well-written copy based on the inputs provided by various members of the client team.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of this project was successfully fulfilling the two commitments we made to Pepper—we created a fantastic site and delivered it in time for the big conference.
Pepper’s service line is complex, with over 20 subpages in the solution list alone. With some meticulous planning and execution, we managed to map all the pages on the site, create a great user experience and flow, and populate each page with content, all while beating the deadline.
In the end, Pepper got the website they wanted, giving them a competitive edge in their sector and solidifying our reputation as a team that consistently rises to the challenge.
“The ONLY company to rise to the challenge of probably one of the tightest deadlines in website design history! The team did an outstanding job on our website to reflect our brand identity.”
—Jenna M., Business Operations Manager, Pepper
My Role: Creative Director & Lead Designer
Services:
Web Design
Visual Brand Uplift
UX Research
Project Leadership
Agency: Literal Humans
CONCEPT PROJECT
I’m the former Creative Director & a founding partner of a full service marketing agency based in London, called Literal Humans.
We built a new agency on a simple premise: When brands live their purpose and develop emotional, human connections with customers—they win.
I designed the agency’s brand identity, created the illustrations, and built a fully responsive marketing website for the launch of our new agency.
Deliverables & Process:
Brand Development
Illustrations
Responsive Website Design
Content Strategy & Build
MDC is a large US-based nonprofit organization that focuses on economic empowerment and racial equity in Southern states. With outdated branding, an obsolete website, and a content marketing strategy in need of rejuvenation, MDC sought our assistance. Together, we successfully executed a rebrand, website redesign, and revamped content strategy.
The Challenge
A common challenge for a lot of nonprofits — many of them do awesome work, but their websites look outdated and confusing.
Every nonprofit’s primary goal is simple: gain supporters and turn them into funders who support the amazing work they’re doing. However, achieving this goal is difficult because communicating with the organization’s target audience is no easy task. A lot of the problems emerge from the website.
In MDC’s case:
Disorganized services and programs meant the website audiences had a hard time understanding the broader story MDC was trying to tell on its website.
MDC struggled to demonstrate their value in a way that would encourage users to take action and donate.
Generally poor information architecture: Between the various dropdowns and inconsistent sidebar menus, the site navigation was confusing and redundant. Even MDC’s own staff had trouble locating information on the site.
The site looked visually outdated. In addition to improving the navigation, there was a clear need for improved aesthetics — a more modern website to reflect MDC’s real impact in the modern world.
Finally, the old MDC site framed the organization primarily as a service provider. But in reality, MDC is more of a partner and a resource to the community and funders.
The Process & Solution:
The website design and development involved several steps:
Industry Immersion
Competitive Audit
Audience Analysis
Website Strategy
Information Architecture
User Flows
Wireframes
Responsive Website Design
Website Development
During the planning phase of the design project, we went through MDC’s lines of services, programs, and subsidiary organizations, and we helped them develop a clearer information architecture strategy to allow them to better communicate about their broad range of programs.
We also conducted a wide range of research, from audience interviews to competitive analysis and website analytic audits, to allow us to build an overarching strategy to guide the web rebuild process. This website strategy allowed us to develop and stick to clear project objectives and allowed us to build a website structure that would flow the site’s various audience groups into the right places, and help them take the right actions.
As with most big website revamp projects, content migration can also be a huge challenge. To streamline the migration process as much as possible, the our team developed the site to match the structure of the old site as closely as possible, while incorporating new features from the new designs. This allowed us to automatically port over MDC’s existing content with WordPress’ built-in migration tools. We then thoroughly reviewed the content and manually corrected any content discrepancies and issues.
In the end, we helped MDC build a crisp, clear indication of what they do and who they are. In addition, we worked on providing a robust resource hub, bringing The State of the South, which used to be a standalone site, into the main website ecosystem. And besides breathing life into the site, the web design was also to serve as a morale booster for staff — something they could be proud of.
Our journey with MDC is proof of how you can take the many challenges that plague and often overwhelm nonprofits and turn them into something beautiful. Now, our journey with MDC continues, featuring a robust lineup of content marketing, design, and web development projects in the pipeline.
Services
Website Redesign
Visual Rebrand
Content Strategy
My Role: Creative Director & Lead Designer
Agency: Literal Humans
Spec Project: Brand identity design for concept Dim Sum house.
Deliverables:
Brand Identity
Menu
Business Cards
Stationery
The Challenge
Core Learning is an educational organization that supports teachers across the nation to help them develop and implement curriculums for literacy and math. Their work ensures that students experience a rigorous, relevant, and inclusive public education, no matter their background or location.
While Core Learning is a well established name in the public education space, their brand and website were severely outdated. The organization’s large, complex website had been built, piece by piece over time, with no intentional strategy, comprehensible information organization, or thoughtful visual design. Their site contained thousands of pages of resources and marketing pages, all of which need to be cleaned up, reorganized, and redesigned to better serve their users.
The Solution
My team and I were hired to overhaul the Core Learning website and brand. We began by engaging a long list of stakeholders and customers in a set of interviews to understand how we could rebuild the website to better serve its wide range of audiences - from teachers to district and state-level administrators, principals, and thought leaders in academia. From our research, we constructed an overarching strategy for the website to serve these audiences, and we built a new, cleaner site map to reflect all of the functions of this website. This site needs to serve as both a marketing website for Core’s large menu of services, as well as act as a resource hub for educators.
We worked with key stakeholders to redesign the website in a new look - something to appeal to educators, not too flashy, but still modern, clean and comprehensible enough to communicate large amounts of often detailed, technical information. We designed and built a responsive site and worked with the client to migrate their thousands of old resources into their new website.
Services
Website Redesign
Information Architecture + Wireframes
User Interviews
Content Strategy
Visual Brand Refresh
My Role: Creative Director & Lead Designer
Agency: Literal Humans
A series of branded content illustrations, created for a wealth & cryptocurrency management app called Kubera.
A series of branded content illustrations, created for a SaaS company called HelloSign, which is owned by Dropbox.
HelloSign allows you to electronically request and add legally binding eSignatures to any document, from new hire agreements to loans, to NDAs.
A series of branded illustrations, created for French appliance retailer, Adepem.
I created a simple, user-friendly website for a traffic school service, to help them stand out in a crowded marketplace, full of price-sensitive competitors that lacked any unique or remarkable branding and design aesthetic.
The Challenge
Nutriology is a health and fitness start-up. They’re creating a web and mobile app that helps users build a custom daily fitness and nutrition plan they can stick to.
I was asked to join a small team that consisted of a founder, a developer, and a nutritionist and marketing expert. I was tasked with designing the full user experience and user interface of the web app.
The Process
Our team conducted qualitative interviews to help us identify exactly what barriers were stopping our wide audience (from young, single people looking to get in better shape to parents who wanted to get their whole family on a healthy track) from achieving their fitness and health goals. We also learned what information (meal plans, recipes, exercise instructions, etc.) that they would want and need to access to in order to be successful. And we also learned which elements users needed to be able to full customize their plans for their own lifestyles.
From these learnings, I structured a set of requirements and built out a series of screens and user flows that would help our users achieve all of these fitness and nutrition goals from one place. We tested our initial idea again with another group of users to validate the concept.
The Solution
Based on this foundation, I designed a web app that was made up of 5 major components:
Weekly meal plan
Weekly fitness plan
Easy-to-use dashboard of metrics and daily to-do’s
Features to help the user connect and communicate with a personal trainer and nutritionist
Calendar tool to help users plan out all of these different components
This app is still in the early stages of development, and more testing is in the works.
These are personal lettering projects I did (just for fun!)