PREP SPORTSWEAR
I was brought onto the Development team at Prep Sportswear to maintain the user interface of the website and make improvements where possible. The whole architecture of the site was wrapped into an explosive ball of tech-debt. After running a site analysis, it was found that there were over 200 unique colors, and similar amounts of unique font-sizes, etc. It was eventually decided to leave the whole thing alone and rebuild. Built within what was already there and still usable was a number of XML based proprietary tools and programs for making site updates. Below are a few highlights of what I worked on for the old website.
Tile management - Building CorelDraw templates and using a proprietary tool built for creating product overlays, I created dynamic tiles using placeholders and database admin tools to create product groupings which would change based on the data associated with the specific store a user was in. This was one method that allow us to further brand stores with custom SEO text and branding schemes.
Asset Creation - Working on the Design team, I was in charge of processing, editing, and maintaining photo assets. We used proprietary tools to dynamically create assets such as swatches and zoom cutouts, along with which I would create mesh grids to overlay placeholders for dynamic design changes. I also worked with the head of the design team to create a merchandising system (and mapping system for that) that allowed for custom collections of designs and associated product groupings.
Asset Creation - I started with this company as a production designer before I became a graphic designer. Nearly all the design templates on the site were created by myself and one other designer using both dynamic and manual insertion of iconography. I created hundreds of templates, as well as doing a custom group of 30 new "fierce" mascots geared toward the high school crowd. They were sharper and more aggressive than our other few collections meant for k-12 generically, and were built with dynamic color schemes that allowed the user to change product colors while maintaining the contrast between the colors, and removing any color-on-color manufacturing/design errors
Asset Creation - Some designs I created were made on a one-off or limited offering basis for high-performing and high-visibility stores. These designs were geared toward promotion through discount-offerings in marketing efforts and emails, geocaching during sporting events, and social media (especially during various high-school and college tournaments and marquee games. The above is a template I designed for licensed colleges, geared toward creating a buzz cycle on social media to generate more sales and in turn more buzz. They were a top seller during the football season we released them for.
I was the sole owner of the CMS for the customer service section of the site and navigation (Umbraco). It included all the contact forms, side navigation, company info, faqs, etc. The fun part was that the legacy site you see was built desktop only and had a separate mobile site housed within the main repository. So any changes made in the CMS needed to be reflected in the mobile sites pages manually. This also meant that often I was balancing and timing my releases to try to maintain the match between the desktop and mobile sites, keeping in mind that often new releases took weeks or months to happen, while the CMS was immediate once I hit publish.
A quick experimental Prep Sportswear homepage redesign prototype. Focus on branding and creating a cleaner layout with site 'how-to' so new users better understand how to use the product. The user flow was a major pain point for new users. This would ultimately be addressed during the site redesign seen in the Little League project in my profile.
