Nberlighting 2021
Lighting Brand Website:
Nberlighting
Summary
Nberlighting is a modern brand specializing in designing, developing, producing and selling acrylic material lighting. They capture eyes then hearts with inspiring experiences anchored in captivating crystal-like textures engraved in highly transparent material that connect deeply with people through their senses.
I was tasked with branding a website to billboard the brand’s story and show the target audience what it offers. An interesting part of this project was to make sure the UI design tone is something the intended audience will relate to. The marketing lead wanted the website to use a more artistic and refreshing style than other lighting brands.
Client
Zhongshan Appe Lighting Co., Ltd.
Role
UX/UI design
Contributed to website contents
Platform & Timeline
Website
2 Month
Team
2 Designers
1 Copywriter
2 Developers
Understand the Brand
One of the challenges was that the established brand and voice that Nberlighting owns were not robust enough to be fully applied in the web design. However, it gave us some flexibility and room to play around with the branding and develop something deep image from it.
Brand Culture
We began our project by visiting their showrooms and diving into the product lines to gain a sense of brand spirit in order to precisely narrate the story and culture. We found that Nberlighting has a proud traditional ethos but a thoroughly modern outlook.
Additionally, we talked to their product director, as he turned out to be a lover of craftsmanship and elaboration, perennially on a quest for the creation of a visual feast of light. His innate ability to see artistic value in the acrylic and the essence of exploiting this transparent trait in a product's design became the starting point for everything new.
We summarized keywords that surround our findings to lead through the design process:
Elegant
Craftsmanship
Artistic
High-end
Ideation
Hand Drawn Style
Working in collaboration with the brand lead, we started with research, sketching and a lot of iteration. To achieve a convergence of tradition and modern design that fits the brand culture we need to consider more creative approaches. For instance, we can draw sites by ourselves — or at least some parts of it.
We brainstormed with sketches to start the visual design and decided to combine hand-written elements with product images as the key elements to convey an artistic retro-look personality. We have also considered that a presentation with a comforting layout combining clean content could ensure the site a high-end style.
Light on, Light out
Another exciting part of the design process was all the discussions and brainstorming over the first glance of the site. We got to make it unforgettable enough to catch viewers' attention while communicating the core story and how it differs from other competitors.
So we think, why don't we put visitor in a scene with our products in it and allow them control the light switch? Then we have this tiny interactive starting page that provides visitor interesting user experience within a home setting while demonstrating the usage scenario.
Prototyping
The direction that we were going towards the design consisted of cultural narratives and eye-catching visual assets style, plus strong photography to drive the experience. The home page is the spotlight of the whole site, we divided it into four main sections in a slider form to display the brand culture and star products.
Home
Product Series
Home (Extended)
Product List
Product Detail Page
Content Creation
Visual Design
In terms of color palette and other visual elements, we decided to use the scheme below after presenting all the ideas to the brand lead. I direct the other designer in the team to create those visual assets including sketches and photography.
Color Palette
#eae3d9
#ffffff
#222222
Visual Elements
Copywriting
As for the narratives, I worked closely with the copywriter and brand lead to create engaging stories to introduce the brand culture and core ethos, translating the brand into a tangible persona.
Final work
Putting things together was a frustrating but important part of the process as we needed to repeatedly adjust the visual assets and narratives to match each other in a complementary layout as well as tweak it to feel harmonious with the entire set.
The corporation with our developers was quite smooth as we got them involved all along with the entire design process to keep the technology advice accompanied in order to check the feasibility of the design whenever new ideas come up.
Home
Product Series
Collection Page
Product Detail Page
Conclusion
I also used this as an opportunity to play around with the site layout under generous flexibility permission. Being a director-designer the first time also gave me some experience in making design decisions all by myself, like determining the information structure and the major tone of the site including brand voice and communication style.
