Sobre is an online fashion magazine showcasing chic, sophisticated and contemporary styles and trends. It is a web design project developed based on a given user persona, with a process emphasizing on visual research.
We were given a magazine reader persona Candice, a 28-year old marketer who reads Vogue, People, Elle and wants to be fashionable and on top of latest trends.
We first looked at branding and visual guidelines of major fashion magazines, such as Vogue, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Nylon and so on, and compared their visual languages with the profiles of targeted audience.
We used Google Audience Analytics to compare age, income, interests of visitors of major online fashion magazines, while summarizing the visual elements of each magazine. Here are some takeaways from our research:
1. Upscale, luxury magazines with higher income audience prefer elaborate serif typefaces, black and white palettes or with one neutral shade color such as dark red.
2. Magazines with younger targeted audience (18-26) use more serif and bold typefaces, with feminine, pastel color palette, or using a single brighter tune like purple for accenting.
3. Magazines focused more on celebrities and gossips use more contrasting and bold typefaces.
4. Most of these magazine readers consider themselves shopaholics. Even though magazine headline describe various topics, the curated images are highly focused on products themselves.
4. Fashion magazines generally favor large photo spreads, fewer texts and ample of white space.
The user flow of our prototype is kept very simple - an ideal loop of users browse the website, read an article and then subscribe, share or purchase a related item.
The final prototype features a clean and flexible homepage layout: A full-width slide gallery to showcase main stories, with various image and text layouts to differentiate content hierarchy. Other than articles, we also added a horizontal scroll to explore styles from selected Instagram accounts and magazine readers, making the magazine more personal and developing a community. Magazine visitors can navigate articles through a separate category page; after finishing an article, they can also browse through items mentioned in the texts and purchase on the brand's site.
