Art Direction, E-Everything, Photo Retouching

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In progress — a case study:
Brand Overhaul for dominiquecohen.com and Related Online and Print Media

Dominique Cohen, Inc., is an established, luxury brand producing high quality jewelry, each piece designed to be beautiful in and of itself, certainly, but also inspiration to wardrobe with others from the line.

The brand sells in Beverly Hills, California, at the company's flagship boutique; nationwide through Neiman Marcus; in Palm Desert, California, at the company's satellite boutique (opening Fall 2021; previously at The Fine Jewelry Bar); at Bechants in Boerne, Texas; and online.

Dominique Cohen jewelry frequents red carpets as well as film and television productions.

The jewelry exudes a chic vibe — a confident, chill, chic California vibe. The former website did not.

I brought fresh eyes (and communications design expertise) to e-store revisions, circumventing visual-tech trends that ran counter to her brand's ethos, that left gaps in (worse yet, invited frustration into) store-shopper communication, and instead suggested alterations — shifting focus from Amazon-like hodge-podge shopping to curated looks, for one — mocked up a few pages as proof of concepts (colors, fonts, flows), evaluated possible platforms (see below), chose a starting point (template), then got to work choosing and tweaking photos, customizing code, writing content, editing data, and overall piecing it all together.

We launched Phase I mid 2018. My foci for Phase I were…
• basic device-responsiveness,
• a fresh brand palette (set by Ms. Cohen then refined for on-screen use by me),
• curated on-model jewelry collection,
• far more highly curated displays of jewelry per type,
• product names rewritten with the customer (rather than sales associate) in mind,
• per-product descriptions (few previously existed), preferably that contain aspects of storytelling and/or brand ethos,
• introduce emulating rather than merely talking about brand themes and ethos (collection versatility, collection longevity, and, of course, that fresh, cool, lifestyle vibe).

A work in progress that I continued to build on during the ensuing years.

Then, in early 2021 I did it all again for the Shopify platform — new template, new coding language (liquid), new data structure to try to adapt to function in our clients' (and brand's) best interest. Updated screenshots coming soon!

Below are a few highlights to the various phases tacked to date.

Brand – Palette

To the casual observer, the most obvious branding change back in 2017-18 was in palette: Gone is the weight of the rich, dark chocolates and warm, rosy woods; in their place are soothing cool grays and a smooth, slightly cool, slightly creamy off-white. Dominique had chosen a basic palette before hiring me: Pantone Egret 11-0103 for backgrounds, Pantone Cool Gray 11c for text and logo. I refined the colors for on-screen use — softened the egret, deepened the gray — to help relax shoppers' eyes while also encouraging images to pop.

Brand – Typography

Online, DC years ago moved away from using its logo type serif (Garamond) for copy in favor of a sans serif (Helvetica, chosen back when we had far fewer web-compatible options), though it continued to use Garamond in print. I nixed both in all but the logotype, going instead with a font family that better echoes not only the logotype's x-height and letter shape but also the more refined mood of the jewelry itself. I chose Mr. Eaves Modern: it compliments the logotype, comes in a myriad of weights, and is both web and print compatible. I styled the entire site using primarily two weights, with one additional used for very small text. (For print, we have added italics; for the website, we went without.)

Challenges – Platform

Ah, 3dcart, the previous site's platform. Not my first choice for the rebrand: not a single Sass template; Bootstrap-based (hurray, I know that one*), however Bootstrap 3.3.5 (yikes: did they even use flexbox back then?); ugly system UI (sprites); bulky, aesthetically outdated templates, for the most part; limited add-ons relevant to our needs; little to no local development preview capability.

I looked into other possibilities: Miva proved impractical. Shopify had some reasonably aesthetic templates that would have given us a better starting point, even some Sass-based, which would have sped development (both would have saved the client money). Squarespace had built-in UI elements that would work with our rebrand; the platform overall, though, was too limiting and its backend code structure outside my wheelhouse*. (I'd recently completed two Squarespace customizations using only CSS and the Admin; the DC project, though, would need backend template customization).

Float — specifically, the amount of time the processing platform holds onto bigger ticket purchases — proved the deciding factor. Only 3dcart meshed with DC's established production model. (Most Dominique Cohen jewelry is crafted on-demand, not held in-stock; the cost of components — 18k golds, diamonds, other stones — is high). So 3dcart it was.

I chose this template as our basis, then got to work.

Challenges – Lowercase Sentences

DC's all-lowercase syntax is hardly a reader's (or writer's) best friend. It's an established part of the brand that the company did not want to forego, so I adapted content to suit:

• On the home page, for example, I used phrases rather than sentences whenever possible. Actually, I did this for two reasons: To foster comprehension despite the lowercase mandate, and to mesh with language used in the brand's Instagram feed. (Part of what I'm helping the company do is be more aware of and consistent within all sales channels — online, in-store, in print. They were doing a good job in some arenas, but nothing like fresh eyes on all to spot failings.)

• On product pages, I rewrote/created descriptions not only to improve what's said but also the format in which it's said. I use line breaks, m-dashes, semi colons and more to make the content easy to read. Work ongoing :-)

Attention to Details — Just a Few (for now)

I've an eye (and ear) for detail and consistency. No one wants to read a bunch of details, however, so I'm always peaked to convey, not merely state, information — and to build synergy amongst elements. I've touched on a few instances above. Others include:

Bye, Bye Dead Ends

I'm working to rid the site of dead ends not only to improve sales but also because frustration breeds tightness, and tightness runs contrary to the brand ethos.

The previous site contained numerous, shopper-frustrating dead ends: The model photos, for instance, while gorgeous, left it up to the shopper to figure out what the model was wearing; too, often focal jewelry — one-up creations that subsequently sold — were no where in the website; and then there were items no longer offered (and so removed from the system) mentioned within descriptions of related products. Work is ongoing.

Product Names: For Shoppers, Not Staff

As mentioned, the brand predates e-commerce. Product names were written for sales staff (particularly for Neiman Marcus staff ordering from a product line sheet); though eventually some product names were mentioned in print ads, for the most part customers never saw them. Many names were cumbersome; too, they contained adjectives (often in quotation marks) that meant little to nothing to most customers. And they all stared with an acronym for gold color: Aside from that YG and RG (yellow gold and rose gold, respectively) aren't commonly known acronyms, starting every product name with 18k yg (or rg) wasn't user-friendly and created a monotone (in a bad way) look to product grids and lists. I've thus been simplifying product names, keeping an eye on both how they complement product images and read within grids and lists as shoppers scroll along e-commerce pages. Work is ongoing.

Full Stops

I added a full stop (period) at the end of each title to give the shopper's eye a little rest, in the vein of our refined yet relaxed, cool vibe ambience. We're carrying this over into DC print media as well.

More later!

*I'm a communications designer, my focus always, "From a third party perspective, what's being said here? Is that what we intend to say? Is the message easy for people to take in? Respond to? Does our brand ethos shine through?" Toward these ends, over the decades I've learned HTML and an array of software so I can understand (and test) pros and cons to tools and approaches.

For example, for e-commerce I look for a powerful, well-functioning template from a proven source (experience long ago taught me to avoid lazy Susan, ad hoc site development whenever possible; too ripe for JS and other conflicts). I don't care what demos LOOK like; I care how (and how well) they function (including if the template overly bloats rendered code). Too, how fully the template makes use of the platform's data structure. Separate what you can change from what you cannot: My wheelhouse is CSS + the order of HTML statements (Liquid and/or Bootstrap if we're talking Shopify) as well as some manipulation of those statement, just not, or only to the most basic degree, the JS behind their functionality.