The Introduction
The journey to Aspira Sportswear began with a trio of college instructors giving a team consisting of a Digital Marketing student, three Web & Software Developer students, and a Graphic Design student (me) a target market and product. The end goal was to develop a functional e-commerce website selling the product of our choice (considering the assigned product type) to our demographic, hitting multiple hard deadlines along the way. During these three months, we were to collaborate with one another to support and better understand the process and perspectives of those with different areas of expertise – what role does the marketer, designer, and developer play in this process, and how do they work together to create a completed product? After our initial meeting, I was elected to the role of project manager, which would be an undertaking but ultimately rich learning experience.
The Challenge
Our given target market was the Bright, Young Professional, and we were to create an e-commerce site and brand that provided Athletic Apparel. Immediately, I looked at our potential competitors: Nike, Adidas, and Patagonia. While we’d all be contributing ideas and elements of creating this new brand, I was ultimately in charge of using my graphic design experience to create the final look, and I knew the contemporary, crisp, relatively simplistic branding of these competitors is where I’d draw inspiration. When considering the Bright, Young Professional, I envisioned an individual in their upper 20s – mid 30s, living in or just outside of an American metropolitan region… near Chicago, Los Angeles, or Manhattan. I kept coming back to the vision of an individual climbing the corporate ladder – this translated to an individual “climbing” some physically, such as a mountain (in which they should wear some form of athletic apparel, of course). Ultimately, I wanted some reference to a mountain in the final logo I’d create. The group agreed with me that the name of our company should be short – as few syllables as possible. This idea of climbing brought me to multiple inspirational terms – “strive”, “climb”, and “reach” being a few of them. Finally, the word “aspire” came to mind, and the word “Aspira” translates to this in multiple languages – I was sold, and so was the rest of my team. Aspira Sportswear we would be!
I knew I wanted an emblem, similar to the way Nike has their identifiable swoosh. Patagonia has a literal mountain in its logo, so I thought I’d make the mountain I was drawn to for our design more implied than directly displayed. After deciding on the perfect brand font (a straight-forward sans serif), I dabbled with the first letter of Aspira to form the idea of a snowcapped mountain within. My team and I were ecstatic with both the full logo and the “A” we could use as our emblem. From there, I determined the modern, fresh colors to enhance the brand; nothing bright or whimsical, but instead clean, modern, and crisp, featuring black and a sapphire blue as our main colors.
During this time, I supported my team in creating user personas, customer journey mapping, and detailing “our story”. Taking a mixture of final products into account from team, I created a branding guide for Aspira Sportswear, highlighting the logo, colors, target market, the company’s background, and overall imagery. I was, and still am, very proud of the branding of this pretend company!
The Site
After my area of expertise finished being highlighted, I worked alongside the web developers to craft a sitemap and create wireframes for the final e-commerce site. Because we were not creating brand new products, I located many applicable product images from our competitors’ websites and branded them to look like our own, creating over 120 mockups that featured articles of clothing in different colors for our customers to pick from. Our marketer developed original product names and descriptions, and we provided our content to the developers.
As the project manager holding the mindset of the graphic designer, the journey to create the actual site was not a smooth one, as we had multiple capable individuals with talent and personalities that did not always mesh. I learned that these developers were used to their style of code, and not all were willing to equally split the work. I learned a lot by watching multiple people explain their own routes to get to the same destination – the languages of web and software development are many! After providing imagery and brand assets, I offered as much guidance as I could and continued to encourage collaboration between the developers. I kept in regular contact with my teammates and shared my feedback on their creations and ideas, making every effort to share updates with the entire group.
Ultimately, given the handful of site bugs that remained when we hit our final deadline, we created a functioning e-commerce site that I could look at and be proud of. As the designated designer of the group, I’m extremely proud of the brand identity I created, and feel confident that I could see Aspira Sportswear’s logo out in the real world.
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