retail – Aaron Hoffmann Principal UX Product Designer

Retail Packaging

Project: Packaging and Retail Displays Design
Role: Designer, Production Artist
Client: Ghirardelli Chocolate
Key Skills: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Product design, Concept development
Summary: A collection of designs and illustrations for retail product packaging and POS displays. I worked on the final mechanical files released to the printers, as well as photo-realistic visualizations of what the products would look like once produced, for use by the marketing teams when selling to external vendors.

All of the images on this page may look like photographs, but are actually Adobe Photoshop renderings meant to look realistic.

The company’s Marketing team would often request imagery of upcoming products for promotional or sales meetings with retail vendors, but because the products had not yet been produced (in order to photograph), I would be tasked with producing “photography” for the non-existent items, using only design files, and flat printer’s dielines, to aid in visualizing.

The above are all seasonal products, for Easter and Valentine’s Day.

Above left, three free-standing in-store displays. Above right, an Easter coupon, available in stores and as magazine or newspaper inserts. All product shown in the coupon flyer—even in the photographed basket—is fictional; actual product had not yet been produced.

Above are two additional counter- or shelf-sitting displays. All product and the displays themselves were fabricated and painted for illustrative purposes.

Promotional Literature

Project: Recruiting trifold pamphlet
Role: Art Director, Designer, Copywriter, Production Artist
Client: KidsDuo, Hokkaido Tsuushin Tokki
Key Skills: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Print design
Summary: A 6-panel trifold used for recruiting English teachers for a chain of private children’s schools in northern Japan.

A chain of franchised children’s English schools in northern Japan was looking to expand its business and needed to attract foreign teachers, so an informational pamphlet was commissioned to that end.

I served as the entire team for this one: Art Director, Designer, Production Artist, Photographer, Copywriter, and Print Producer. Basically, everything you see (including the white space in some sense) is my work. Of note to anyone unfamiliar with Hokkaido or Japan’s geography, the large shape on the front cover is a very stylized representation of the island’s shape, and the swath of photo diamonds on the inside spread is a rough representation of Japan as a collection of islands.

Distributed throughout high-traffic areas for foreigners, this trifold generated an immediate increase of interest for job-seeking English-speakers, allowing the business to expand with additional locations.

Direct Marketing

Project: Direct mail envelope design
Role: Art Director & Designer, Brand Design & Integration team
Client: Best Buy Co.
Key Skills: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Brand Design
Summary: Redesign of the envelope delivered to millions of customers per year; the plain blue kit with a simple logo lacked energy and failed to generate enthusiasm amongst recipients.

A Failure of Communication

Best Buy sends physical mail to millions of customers per year–sometimes coupons, promotional offers, or other communique–but found a distinct lack of enthusiasm when polling recipients amid waning response rates. Surprising no one, it turns out sending people something that looks like junk mail or workaday marketing chirashi will generate disinterest.

Recognising an opportunity to upgrade their brand image and also improve redemption without having to sweeten the offers, the underwhelming envelope needed replacing. That said, while the enclosed communique also underwent a redesign, this case study discusses only the envelope.

ese_set — Left: the selected concept, final design. Top shows the rear with flap. Bottom shows postage and address areas.
Right: alternate concept

Concepts Galore

All said and done, I produced well over a dozen concepts, each in varying stages of polish; four of them shared here. Aside from demonstrating diversity of thought, comparing the different ideas allows one to discern the various anatomical aspects of the envelope perhaps not otherwise obvious: the addressee area (reversed/white text not allowed), the return address, and the postage area.

At the time, efforts to transform the organisation into one more “customer centric” permeated virtually all discussions related to marketing.

For this project, I was the designer and art director. I produced pencil concepts, rough and polished presentational comps, and helped prepare files for press.

TLDR; A look at what went into trying to launch an unusual new product within a larger, successful line of traditional offerings.

Project: “it™ bed” Product, Brand UX/CX Design
Role: Art Director, Product Designer
Client: Sleep Number (formerly Select Comfort)
Key Skills: Wireframing, Photoshop, UX/UI, Web design, Brand design, Style guide, Illustrator, Figma
Website: itbed.com (retired; now redirects to sleepnumber.com)
Summary: A swashbuckling adventure to define the branding and (mostly digital) brand user experience of a new product within the confines of its larger retail brand.

Preamble

Sleep Number (formerly Select Comfort) is a premium mattress and sleep product brand in America. In mid- to late-2016 they launched a new product to compete in the growing “bed in a box” space mostly owned and pioneered by Casper, but also to reach a younger demographic than they had been pursuing for decades. Enter the it bed. It married some of the adjustable Sleep Number technology with smartphone connectivity, but delivered in slender, unboxing-memeable cardboard.

The efforts put into engineering this new product unfortunately did not translate in equal measure to its marketing or branding; the result: an obvious collage of individual contributions, ranging from elements indistinguishable from the company’s “core” line of products to a schizophrenic series of new identities, tones, and brand languages every other month. Nobody said launching a new brand and identity was easy or quick.

In early 2017 Sleep Number approached me to lend my skills in product design and UX to help unify all of these points, paired with a structured market plan. Because all of the brand’s assets were designed scattershot by whomever seemed to have bandwidth on a given day, rather than approach any of those individual components (like the website, logo, or app), I aimed to apply comprehensive, end-to-end UX concepts to the entire brand; everywhere the public might encounter it.

Harnessing Scattershot Efforts

Left: a sample of one inherited brand identity. Right (2): two excerpts of a larger onboarding series of emails targeted to new or interested prospective buyers.

That said, due to the it bed being a subset of the larger Sleep Number brand, a few things were unfortunately beyond our team’s control or influence, such as affecting the product name, logo, etc.; the prevailing reasoning was to avoid disrupting the delicate sensibilities of the myriad contributors thus far.

A Styleguide to Rule Them All

My first point of business was to establish a brand style guide, replete with baseline tone, voice, and visual language to serve as a yardstick against any work—whether done internally or externally, across all channels. Until my involvement, only partial guides with vague aspirational content and stock imagery existed; courtesy of an external agency—the entire body of them outdated by virtually every measure of our new internal team’s white boarding of brand attributes, so it was an obvious cornerstone towards building a stable foundation for the brand’s design and overall UX.

Sample pages from the brand guide. Note that some pages are altered to show analogous content from other brand guides in this portfolio.

New iconography that contributed to the overall new design language that would eventually inform the digital product UI.

New logo exploration to mirror and dovetail with the other design language and also better describe the physical product.

Aligning Multi-channel Touchpoints

The second was to begin scaling the mountain of the product’s website, built impetuously to be little more than a two- or three-page promotional resource and merely to have a minimal online presence. Shockingly, according to the company’s web manager, the site was built without any regard whatsoever for commerce, a brutally honest admission made brutally aware to any visitor looking to make purchases or find deeper information, only to encounter wave upon wave of sales-affecting hurdles. Luckily, this wasn’t the first time I have inherited what is essentially a WordPress theme and challenged with maturing the UX end to end.

Onboarding, welcome, and promotional emails that benefit from intentional copy, photography, and brand UX principles.

The third point, was to develop regular marketing materials (promo emails, display ads, etc.) to refine the content used to inform the bigger, more permanent first and second points, through iterative design exploration and A/B testing. As above, the prevailing method for these consumer touchpoints had been to apply whatever the current identity to the persistent cycles of sales promotions; so an email or banner ad campaign every few weeks with the new promo—and of course, a menagerie of brand identities to match.

Posthumous Recognition

Unfortunately, despite my and the team’s best efforts, based on a nearly complete erasure of it from the internet, it appears the it bed—a premium, tech-infused, semi-portable mattress for the millennial vagabond—was simply too limited a market and too expensive a product to survive. Mere months after my departure from Sleep Number, the company disappeared the it bed, apparently in favor of the lower end version of its traditional product line.

What you’ll see in the materials shown here are a few snapshots representing the resulting direction of the above explorative processes; I feel uncomfortable revealing the starting points because a) they aren’t my work to share, and b) by comparison might reflect negatively upon those who did work on them.

Of note: a) the responsive designs; b) consistent branding elements; c) custom iconography… all my direct efforts, made in Adobe Illustrator, Figma, and Photoshop.

Responsive web designs: mobile (left) and tablet/desktop (right). New video content was developed to support all of the points, especially because the target market favors video over reading blocks of text.

Some of these designs represent actual creative released to the public. Others represent in-progress/in-development projects that remained private to protect any promotional or sensitive brand information; available now that the product has expired over a year ago.