Project:
Art direction and visual design for online retailer
Client:
CafePress is an ecommerce site and pioneer of customizable, personalized products. They ship over 6M products annually and have 11 million unique visitors monthly.
Project Expertise:
Art Direction
User Experience
Ecommerce
Marketing Design
Email Marketing
Turning enthusiastic fans into customers
My first assignment as a design consultant for CafePress involved designing a shopping template for a partnership with ABC. The ABC/CafePress online store was hosted on ABC and operated off the CafePress platform. It utilized CafePress technology to allow visitors to the site and fans of the shows to design their own t-shirts, posters, water bottles, and other custom products. The pages were a sort “gear warehouse” for fans. I designed the templates and generated designs for merchandise for 20-plus shows. The success of that effort led to a long-term contract with CafePress.
Social shoppers
Marketing to users active on social media allowed CafePress to be more conversational and show an informal, human-centric side to their branding. CafePress apparel was especially amenable to social marketing—relevant memes could be featured and generate leads to the site. CafePress also had other profiles on Twitter which served as their frontline means of communicating and providing customer service. I designed campaigns and profile art for their social media presences.
Merchandising for any product and any occasion
The seasonal nature of marketing design necessitates the creation of multi-channel designs. I was responsible for creating seasonal and special event landing pages and also extended the look and feel of the campaigns into email, promotional banners and other site assets. I specialized and enjoyed designing for the home channel at CafePress.
The takeaways
The greatest design challenge at CafePress was the degree of skill needed to map flat, vector designs onto dimensional blank product photography, especially in themed photo editorials. Every initial design of any asset started with a blank product that needed to be mapped, styled, and incorporated into a larger aesthetic. All the designers were essentially virtual stagers. It’s often the nitty-gritty finer details that make up a pleasing gestalt for a whole design, and it was that kind of work that honed my production eye.
