Utility Canvas

Background

Utility Canvas is a legacy brand with a robust narrative, having both past and future retail presence, a superior product, and loyal clientele of high-end customers, boutiques, and designers. Through creative reconstruction, our goal was to build a framework that would allow for growth, elevation, and adaptability, with a focus on design, messaging, and functionality, while reinforcing brand value throughout the customer experience. We will build a website via Shopify using new and existing assets, elevate the Utility Canvas brand, and convey their story to all customers via product, navigation, and a minimalistic and modern aesthetic.

Objective

Utility Canvas is a well-established brand with a loyal customer base. Our project was aimed to relaunch their website through a creative revitalization that will allow growth and adaptability, with a focus on design, messaging, and website functionality. Tomorrow Creative will work to elevate the Utility Canvas brand and convey their story to their customers. We identified key issues that we would target product, navigation, and a implementing a minimalistic and modern aesthetic. The end goal: redesign the website's layout, improve user experience, restructure the navigation, and organize the product in a way that is easy to find. Overall, enhancing the quality of lifestyle and product photography through brand messaging, and improving the product copy communicate their voice while also remaining SEO friendly and light on their feet.

Results

Upon project completion we have successfully revamped the Utility Canvas website through Shopify utilizing their existing photography and organizing it in a way where all products have all relevant alt images for the SKUs. We also established a process for photographing new inventory to ensure minimal downtime from ready product to their customers hands. The brand has been elevated both site and branding, and the customer shopping experience has been significantly improved.

The Brand Guidelines for creating promotional materials contain a quick brand blurb and simple image paired with their logo overlaid on top. The intention is to convey the brand in a refined and elevated manner, even when used for promotions or ad material such as the Amazon A+ content. The brand blurb should be brief and direct, highlighting the key elements of the brand.

We delivered all necessary assets, including image and excel files, and provided training to the staff via tutorial videos on how to do product uploads. Additionally, we have improved the product copy to be optimized for SEO and increased product margins to allow for promotional discounts and marketing to be factored into their business strategy and planning. Our work has resulted in more efficient workflow and laid the groundwork for Utility Canvas’ future growth, with actionable data created in order for them to make informed business decisions moving forward.

Layout; Look and Feel

The Utility Canvas website underwent a complete transformation. Through an updated, minimalist design, we captured the essence of their brand and targeted areas that conveys their story for their home, collection, product, and about pages. Elements that were overlooked before like high quality lifestyle photography, typography considerations, and general polished design, are now all baked into the new site. After getting a deeper understanding of Utility Canvas as a brand,we aimed to translate those aspects through any design means. For example, the previous website copy was all in Helvetica, which we migrated to Alte Haas Grotesk, as this font is a little rough around the edges with similar bold and artistic qualities, perfectly aligning with Utility Canvas.

UX; Hierarchy and Navigation

One of our main goals was to create a user-friendly website with features familiar to customers and seamless navigation. This entailed restructuring that navigation, collection pages, and overall structure of the website in order to promote efficient shopping and high operational and aesthetic quality. Previously, the top navigation contained 50 subcategories where real estate was occupied equally by all products. This made for am overwhelmingly, heavy menu that was not conducive to an efficient customer experience. These images showcase the majority of their menu options and violates many UX/UI best practices.

UC old navigation examples of bad site architecture and bad ux ui practices. digital creative agency new design

Organization; In order to condense the top navigation, we extracted Give, Stay, and Sale as those pages were redundant and contained little to no content. Any relevant information was dispersed across the new navigation and page setups. We also eliminated the dropdown to allow users to explore the site. Similarly with the top navigation, we updated the footer to follow a better system of organization and centralize more of the relevant links and pages. We wanted customers to be able to seamlessly navigate throughout the website, without confusion from the clutter. With that said, we streamlined the entire navigation in order to do so. Carry, Home, and Wear are the new collection categories we decided on, and with those as the overarching groups, we were able to place the products across all three accordingly.

Photography

Utility Canvas was in need of a visual refresh, especially with lifestyle and product imagery. While the previous website included little to no photos showcasing the brand or the product, we took the opposite approach. High quality photography immediately increases the value of their product while elevating the brand. We weaved in lifestyle photography across all pages, where it was lacking before in order to provide a nice balance. We weaved in lifestyle photography across all pages, where it was lacking before in order to provide a nice balance. It plays off of the newly added copy, expands the brand story, and even instills trust in customers.

Spreadsheet and Item Data

In addition to the design and development, we also provided extensive work on excel including product management and tagging, info clean-up and standardization, product categorization, SKU organization, and procedures for collection and class categories on Shopify. Our work herre allowed for efficient product uploads via CSV uploads and improved SEO copy on the product listings, featuring customer friendly and on brand writing as well as bulleted product specs for features such as care instructions or dimensions. We also provided training and tutorial videos to their staff to ensure that the brand was well equipped with the tools and knowledge to self-sufficiently create future updates and grow their brand.

Overall, our goal was to preserve the essence that defines the Utility Canvas brand while revitalizing it and elevating it to new heights. Their rebrand has not only enhanced their business, but also ensured its relevance and competitiveness in the market for years to come.

Unfinished Business

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