Design and build of an e‑commerce web experience for a basketball fashion brand

Project

Mars Reel is a Los Angeles based startup providing exposure for the most exciting young talent in high school and college basketball. They also collaborate with popular brands to create exciting basketball-related promotions and run a basketball academy. Through their popular video features, basketball coach branded sportswear, and social media prowess; the demand for merchandise grew to the point that they created their own fashion brand, The Future is on Mars.

While they worked on the fashion and production side of things, they hired me to creatively direct their digital brand, design and build a responsive e-commerce website, and design and build suite of marketing and transactional emails. They wanted something simple and distinctive (think: Supreme), and I had fun building some animation into the web experience to make it a more memorable experience.

Involvement

Creative director
Branding
Web design
Front-end build

Date

July 2019

Animation

I introduced subtle animations on page load and scroll to bring the simple design elements to life and aide the experience as you navigate the website and shop the products.

Creative direction

Mars Reel love the simplicity of brands like Supreme, which I drew influence from in the minimal design direction. The black and white, grainy images mixed with a minimalist grid, loads of white space, product images, and simple typographic elements create an edgy, cutting-edge brand.

Note: All images used in these designs are a placeholder, used as art direction for Mars Reels' upcoming photoshoots, when their product line was ready.

Footer

A prominent footer focusses on driving email signups and new Instagram followers. Both important sales and marketing channels for the brand.

The painted elements are an interesting visual element to break up the white space and draw focus to the new content on page scroll.

Product hero

The client wanted the product front and center. I supersized the product images with a gallery of swipeable images. A bottom bar slides up into the view on page scroll revealing basic product image and a prompt to scroll down to view product info.

Quirky grid

White space, exaggerated spacing, and a quirky grid and alignment throughout each template help to draw focus to certain elements. Collection pages were a great opportunity to introduce imagery into a grid of product images — mixing lookbook and products in one space. Inspiration as you shop.

Email templates

I designed and built a suite of email templates to market Mars Reel's products, as well as transactional email templates.

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