Two phones showing different parts of a story about pork chops

Seasons

Digital evolution of a print magazine

Web content design

Interaction design

Animation

Ceros

Where

Iowa, USA

What

Website content

Why

Grey Dog Media

Role

UX Web / Graphic Designer

Category

Food & Lifestyle Marketing

When

2021-2023

Overview

While at Grey Dog Media I worked on various projects. Seasons Digital Experience as it was called, was a project created to have a website to publish the Seasons print magazine content online, and in the process create a more interactive and delightful user experience that would reach a new demographic.

  • Increase brand awareness of Seasons by reaching new demographics that interact on the web.

  • Increase engagement time with Seasons content.

Print Magazine Content

Below is a single story that exemplifies the type of content and layouts I was tasked with turning into digital stories on a monthly deadline using the tool Ceros.

  • Porkchop Magazine story
  • Porkchop tips and how to cook
  • addtional pork chop recipes
  • Porkchp recipes

Process

Turning multi-page spreads of recipes, copy and products into a web page that allowed the user to interact and save content, or jump out to buy from Hy-Vee any product on the page. This started with mockups, reordering content, and determining the best way to display the information to the user. In this example making specific product call outs into pop-ups to hide secondary information and allowing the photography to breathe and sell the products and to prevent the user from being overwhelmed. At this time I determined what objects could be animated to better tell the story, sell the product and fit the style of the content.

Moblie Version of the Top Chop Story

Additional Projects

In addition to the above process there were many smaller projects related to the Seasons magazine I was responsible for.

2022 Thanksgiving Seasons Digital Promo

For this project while I was working at Grey Dog Media I was tasked with creating the promo animation that would showcase the primary story of the issue which for this project was the November 2022 story: Turkey Time. Spanning multiple spreads it was split into many different sections and because I’d recently learned After Effects I was confident I’d be able to deliver on a short animation that would preview this story.

Three different storyboard flow sketches created to talk through with the Creative Director

Starting with storyboarding a few ideas that come from extrapolations of the media. My initial idea was having a turkey walking then, either revealing, or morphing into the title of the story ‘Turkey Time’ then ending with a CTA and the cover of the magazine. A similar idea was to transition from an illustrated turkey using it’s feathers into the cover of the magazine and title. Then the third idea where I’d showcase each step of the process 1→ 4 preview each category that appears in the story using the photography of the magazine.

After discussion with the Art Director we settled on option three.

Pinterest Video Story Advertisement

Through a similar process I also created this Pinterest advertisement for one of the stories of the magazine in an effort to draw more traffic to the content.

Results

The project was active from June 2021-March 2023 when it was ended by the client to go in a different direction. I was not made aware of the purpose of the pivot. However, based on the few statistics I had access to, the project was a success. While working on this project I produced many different stories which can be found on the Seasons website.

  • Average Monthly Visitors ~40k

  • 1.5 Minutes Average Time Spent per User

Interested in working together?

© 2023 Alexis Waters. All rights reserved.

© 2023 Alexis Waters. All rights reserved.

© 2023 Alexis Waters. All rights reserved.