Project Overview
For my final project in Visual Communication Design, I drafted a brand book for the Sammamish Animal Sanctuary. My responsibilities included redesigning the logo, curating typography / imagery, and improving a UX flow to enhance usability.
Duration
10 weeks
Role
Graphic Design
UX Design
Team
Myself
Organization
Sammamish Animal
Sanctuary
Research
About SAS
The Sammamish Animal Sanctuary is a nonprofit animal sanctuary founded on a 6 acre farm. The sanctuary takes in abused, neglected, unwanted, and/or homeless barnyard animals, and provides them with a comfortable and stable home. Today, SAS is home to 60+ rescues and over 100 volunteers. The sanctuary promotes equal access to rescues and education surrounding animal abuse by making entry free to all visitors. Through SAS’s volunteering opportunities, reservations, summer camps, and goat yoga, SAS is also a community builder with all animal lovers.
Current Brand & Moodboards
After taking a look at the brand's social media and websites, I came up with keywords to define the brand & created a moodboard to gain inspiration for my redesign. The keywords include: homey, family, tranquil, restful, simple, nature, outdoors, playful, community, loving, care, nurturing, humble, relaxing.
Logo Redesign
The first thing I redesigned was the brand's logo. I wanted to better convey the sanctuary's mission of rescue and protection of animals. I experimented with many different ideas, but landed on an image of an alpaca being guarded by an arch.
Redesigning mobile flow for viewing animals
SAS has a cool feature which allows users to view biographies for each of their 60 animals. However, users have to click redundant buttons in order to view these biographies. I started with a Task Flow to identify areas where the flow could be simplified.
Key insights from task flow:
The user having to click "Our Animals", and then "Meet our Residents", is redundant
There should be an option for users to skip to a specific animal rather than scroll through 15 cards
Rather than making a page for each animal (which requires users to click the back button to view another animal), there should be scroll cards
New flow allows more direct access to animal biographies
With the new flow, users can…
1. Access the animal biographies through the button and hamburger menu, allowing multiple access points
2. Jump to a specific animal without scrolling too far down
3. Scroll through each animal instead of having to click the back button each time they want to view a new animal
4. Easily navigate across and within pages through a common call to action color (warm yellow) for buttons, drop down menus, and swipe bubbles
Final Brand Book
After redesigning the logo, mobile flow, and curating typography, imagery, and iconography, I put it all together into a Brand Book. The Brand Book defines the look and feel of the sanctuary.
Reflections
What I'd do differently…
Consider scalability: When I first created the logo, I designed it for a mobile screen. I found it awkward to resize the logo for different phone screen widths, and desktop sizes. I would have focused on resizing the text in the logo to scale across multiple devices (and printed materials), which would ensure a more consistent and professional look.
Assess the information hierarchy before redesigning user flows: In my redesign of viewing animal biographies, I had assumed that this was the most important feature for users. Talking to the sanctuary about which features / pages they want highlighted would have been much more beneficial and provide a clearer roadmap on the features to redesign next.
Learnings
Throughout the process of deciding colors, typography, and other aspsects of the brand, I found myself questioning my decisions. Referring back to the mission statement, my own research of the sanctuary, and its audience helped me move forward in choosing the branding assets. This was also my first project where I used a task flow to quantify the number of steps a user had to take to achieve their goal. I found this metric helpful in deciding where to eliminate unnecessary interactions and streamline the process of viewing animal biographies.