Unison Label
Role: Lead Designer
Design System
UI/UX
E-Commerce
Website Launch
In August 2023, after more than two decades, iconic brand French Connection AU relaunched as Unison Label.
Brandbank’s decision to relaunch French Connection AU as Unison Label grew from the desire to fully shape the narrative as a unique and vertical Australian owned fashion brand. Allowing for greater opportunity to grow the brand, aligned with the company's own strategic vision. This meant moving from Salesforce to a whole new website on Shopify.
Leading the UX design of the website - I worked collaboratively with an external branding agency, my fellow UX designer and our external developers to build a design system housing all new UI components, reusable modular templates and the new Unison brand styleguide.
What I worked on:
01. Interactive Prototypes
02. High-Fidelity Wireframes/Mockups
03. Design System/Design Specifications for Developer Handover
04. Development/Design Testing
05. Content Site Migration
The Unison marketing team desired a great deal of flexibility and customisation when it came to the modules and templates. This was our driving force when planning the design system, resulting in a multitude of modules and components to choose from to create their desired layout - specifically for the homepage but with the opportunity to use across the rest of the site.
The Duality Mark which is highlighted as Unison’s central emblem, featured across clothing through to store activations and packaging heavily influenced the design direction of the website. This was done tactically through the square icon, predominantly used across key UI elements across the site as a visual navigator tool.
During the delivery phase, using my knowledge of working with modules within the Sanity CMS, I assisted the Unison team by up-skilling them on how to easily transition from using the design templates built in Figma to how it all translates in the back-end within Sanity. Making sure that all modules in Figma were easily labeled and corresponded with what was built in Sanity.
I then created an internal Figma file containing all of the site pages that were going live. Built out with all of the new and approved components. This was then shared with all key teams and stakeholders to input all final content including copy and final images. Allowing stakeholders to see how the page would ideally look like before launch. This allowed the Digital team to easily migrate content to the new site in batches or as things became approved before sharing the staging site for final approval.
This helped the team tremendously in building all landing pages and loading content for launch, speeding up the approval process for go-live.
Overall, the launch of Unison’s website was a highly demanding project but ultimately a fun collaborative effort that brought upon lots of learning during the entirety of the project. The design system was built to allow plenty room for growth and I am excited to see how future design teams take, pick apart and expand it over the years to come.
