Brief: Dean Home Supply and Service Co. is a multifaceted company that caters to not only the DIY community but also to the "do it for me" crowd. If they just need the parts, Dean can supply them with it but if they need the crew to come along with it and help them install something a little bit larger, they can do that just as well.

For this project, I was in charge of redesigning their website to help these two crowds get the information that they need quicker and to distill some of the redundant pages from websites past. I focused on the customer journey for each of these two groups and listing out their needs so that we could properly design something easy and effective for them to use.

Why was a redesign necessary?
The goal behind this project was to update, consolidate, and to make the user experience of the site better by getting you the information you need quicker and easier than it was before. With the original site, there was a problem with hierarchy and organization of information. Pages weren’t where you expected them to be and there were redundant sections that all said the same thing. We defined the objectives that we wanted the site to accomplish and restructured everything by level of importance to the people viewing the site. What information did they need to know and how can we best deliver it to them? How can we create an easier more enjoyable user experience These things drove the reasoning behind every bit of this site design.

How we used color to our advantage:
Yellow is the accent color throughout the brand and is used for buttons, links, important pieces of text such as quotes or numbers, and any other call to action that needs to stand out from the rest of the page or composition. The deep dark shades of blue and grey make the yellow pop out and immediately draws the eye to it. We used this to our advantage to direct the viewer towards certain actions or pieces of information we wanted them to see. This ultimately benefits the viewer to see the information they need quicker and easier.

The logo refresh:
It’s always a tricky thing to change or alter a mark that has represented a company for a long time. With Dean, we wanted to keep the same elements but adjust them to be more legible and work better at small sizes as well as removing points of tension that existed in the original versions. By updating the typefaces, creating more contrast, stroke variation, and giving certain elements more space, we were able to do just that.