Vicki Strull Design
VICKI STRULL is a Graphic Designer with more than 25 years of experience in Brand Identity and Packaging design.
She didn’t want just any ordinary portfolio site. Our goal was to show all she could do for a business in a sophisticated, highly designed way that subliminally shows how intentional and purposeful her design is. She wanted the visitors to be surprised and delighted.
Services:
UX/UI
Custom Website Design with unique animations and interactions
Agency:
Freelance, Gooneybird Design
Command attention: A non-traditional opening
As a creative designer, Vicki wanted a landing experience on her site that would delight and surprise visitors. One of her seminal lectures as a speaker is titled, “You have 8 seconds.” The concept being there is that little amount of time to capture someone’s attention, so you better make those seconds count.
To bring that concept to life, we gamified an 8 second experience, where the user is encouraged to erase the screen to reveal a video with flashes of Vicki’s work. We chose this style for the background video to show the amount and variety of Vicki’s work, but also to create motivation, and a sense of urgency, to erase the whole screen to see what it is.
A stark contrast: Homepage Hero
To continue to create intrigue and surprise after the opening experience, when you land on the homepage, you find a stark contrast of a hero section with a ton of white space and very little color. The opening experience uses flashes of brightly colored images to get users excited about the site they’re entering. We replicate that experience with the desktop hero video animation. Once the user starts to move their mouse over the white space, a play button grows to entice you to watch the video. It serves to bring color, intrigue and surprise back into the white space.
A Look across brands: Case Studies
Unlike typical portfolio websites that silo their experience by the individual brand, Vicki wanted to tell her experience story by outcomes across brands. This posed a unique design challenge, as we needed to have multiple big name brands represented equally. Our visual solve was to allow the user to click on the different logos to reveal the brand work that Vicki had done for each of them.
Death to the logo grid: Client Experience
Despite there being many big names, there were three reasons we didn’t use a typical logo grid to display Vicki’s vast client experience:
We needed a way to give a quick overview of what Vicki had done for each client, especially since our case studies were not organized by individual client.
We needed to use the logos for case study lead-ins and there are many pages that have both.
With a career spanning more than 25 years, there were too many clients to display logos of.