Springload
Klim
Klim
Type
Foundry
Website
Best Visual Design - Function /
Nominee
Springload
Best Visual Design - Function
Nominee
"We wanted the experience to be effortless, informative and interesting, and for buyers to encounter a straight-forward and direct purchasing and licensing process. Aesthetically, we wanted the redesign of the site to complement Söhne, which is our new brand font."- Kris Sowersby, Klim’s Director
Q: Talk about your initial prototypes. How did those ideas change throughout design and execution?
A: The brief was informed by interviews with returning, new and potential customers, usability testing the old site, and prototyping of initial concepts in design software and code to validate and further test a variety of approaches. This process confirmed the data built up over six years; that is, visitors come to Klim to browse and buy, but they also come for font design information, behind-the-scenes articles on typeface craft, interviews, essays and critiques. We also learned more about why users sometimes struggled with the licence selection and e-commerce set-up, which became an important area to focus on and improve with the redesign.What breakthrough or “a-ha” moment did you experience when concepting or executing this project?
If you inspect the browser console, you’ll discover we built a small easter egg as a homage to the work of Josef Müller-Brockmann (specifically his Grid Systems in Graphic Design book) where you can see the underlying grid of the site by combining Ctrl+Alt+Shift+g on any page. Within the type specimen pages, you can toggle the page color by the icon in the navigation or by combining Ctrl+Alt+Shift+t. With both of these commands you’ll be able to recreate the book cover with a bit of experimenting.