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.
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.
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
