Experience Design | 2020
Momentum
Momentum provides a personal space for new graphic artists to get inspired by art challenges and prompts, and privately store all of their art in one place. By leveraging Moleskine’s existing art challenges, Momentum can turn one time customers into loyal customers & personally interact with Moleksine’s brand values.
Roles
Content Design
UX & UI Design
Art Direction
Visual Design
Research
User Testing
Tools
Figma
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Premiere Pro
Type
Team of 4
Date
December 2020
5 Week duration
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Contributions
For this project, I was involved in the visual design, design process and lead in content design. I conducted user research alongside interface design and user experience design of the application, more specifically led the visual design of the homepage. Moreover, I was profoundly involved in art direction decision making, particularly in the color choices. I ensured that the colors were engaging, encouraging, and trustworthy while presenting the Moleskins brand itself. As the lead content designer, I worked to produce and iterate images alongside a short video clip to best communicate the idea behind the project. The project was done remotely in 5 weeks period of time.
Process
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Problem Statement
Moleskine is an aspirational brand built on an iconic notebook. Their story has a global reach and is connected with the lifestyle of the creative class. Through research over five weeks, we discovered that Moleskine’s target customers perceive Moleskine notebooks as valuable due to price and quality. As a result, some customers do not freely create graphic art for fear of wasting pages in their notebooks.
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Opportunity
In Moleskine’s annual report, they recognize that digital apps add value to consumers’ brand experiences. By leveraging Moleskine’s existing art challenges and brand values, we can encourage customers to use Moleskine notebooks as open platforms for creativity.
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Framing
In light of this, we thoughtfully framed our project with Moleskine’s creativity brand value in mind and asked the two questions above:
“How might we foster creativity and productivity by leveraging Moleskine’s existing art challenges?”
“How might we guide customers to use Moleskine notebooks as open platforms for creativity?”
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Primary Reseach
Over 5 weeks, we conducted 14 user interviews with people that use notebooks and affirmed that Moleskine customers often find they need a special occasion to use a Moleskine notebook. This lead us to two different kinds of customers.
Customer 1
The Organised Notetaker who uses notebooks to jot down notes and sketches quickly as part of her job. And the Graphic Artist that enjoys creating art in her notebook in her spare time.
Customer 2
Understanding the importance of Moleskine’s brand pillar to foster creativity, we chose to focus on the Graphic Artist and how their creative process could benefit from using Moleskine notebooks freely.
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Persona
Understanding the importance of Moleskine’s brand pillar to foster creativity, we chose to focus on the Graphic Artist and how their creative process could benefit from using Moleskine notebooks freely. Based on this, our final persona became Sara, who is a novice graphic artist that creates art as a hobby and needs fresh ideas to improve her art skills.
Art Direction
The visuals extend Moleskine’s identity by retaining an aspect of sophistication with the use of readable headline serifs and sans-serifs. The mellow-toned palette is built around Moleskine’s bold orange adding a sense of creativity. Connecting the analog and digital, stickers and a lively voice are used throughout the app to encourage artists to create.
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Design Principles
To ensure the app is approachable for novice graphic artists like Sara and reflects Moleskine’s brand values, we created 3 design principles to guide our process.
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Be personal to build trust and provide a judgment-free space for art.
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Be encouraging to motivate and support graphic artists on their art journey.
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Be lively to engage artists with friendly and creative energy.
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Design System
Fonts
To further extend Moleskine’s identity and image of excellence, we use Canela, a font used in their annual reports. Canela is an elegant transitional serif, which is evident in its use of contrasting stroke weights, sharp serifs, and curved bowls. Proxima Nova, a mix of modern and geometric type, is mainly used for subsection headings for its uniform stroke weight and readability. This is optimally paired with Canela due to their equal x-heights to maintain cohesion and a harmonious flow from headline to the body copy.
Colors
As seen by the buttons, the brighter orange stands out and is used for interactive elements including primary buttons. The WCAG guidelines for accessibility were considered to ensure sufficient color contrast between elements so the text is more readable for people even if they can’t see the full range of colors. Elements are separated by 2n spacing to ensure consistency, and interface cards have a border-radius to mimic Moleskine notebooks.
Prompts
Prompts
Within the app, artists have access to prompts to help them get started. These are presented on paper-like elements to connect to their physical notebook featuring rounded corners and the ability to swipe through prompts similar to flipping through pages.
Challenges
Challenges
They can also create their own challenges to work towards personal goals or participate in Moleskine art challenges. Throughout Momentum, artists are greeted with a mellow palette to appear friendly and inviting.
Challenge
Challenge Complete
As they create we speak to them in the second person, with the word “You”, and encourage them with stickers! When they complete a challenge we’ll celebrate with them.
Library
Library
Connecting back to the brand, notebooks in the artist’s Library appear similar to a physical Moleskine notebook.
Timeline
Timeline
The timeline allows artists to view all of their art in one place to easily see themselves improve. At the bottom, they will see a personal message with the date they joined Momentum and some encouragement.
Sticker Book
Sticker Book
We’ve also included a Sticker book where artists can press and drag to emulate the feeling of peeling and placing a sticker on a page. While adding another paper-like quality, this small gamification encourages artists and instills a sense of accomplishment.
Business Value & Customer Journey
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Journey Map
The customer discovers the Momentum app through the packaging on the new purchased Moleskine notebook and they learn about how having a personal place for their art can benefit their creative process and art skills. As an additional physical touchpoint, they will find stickers like the ones featured in the Momentum app that they can use in their physical notebook. Art challenges and prompts provide inspiration and help the customer increase her productivity. While the private library and timeline help them store all of their art in one place and see their skills improve.
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Value
By leveraging Moleskine’s existing art challenges and allowing graphic artists to create their own challenges we can increase customer engagement with Moleskine’s brand values and provide long-term engagement by making Moleskine a habit.
For Moleskine
Increases customer interaction with the business’ brand values and turns using Moleskine into a habit for long-term engagement.
For Customers
Encourages customers to create graphic art more consistently and improve their art skills.
Takeaway
Through this project, I learned that there’s a lot that can be achieved in a short amount of time by having proper time management, attention to detail, and quick iterations. Through the five-week period of time, we struggled with finding an innovative idea to focus on until the last two weeks. We went back and forth with ideas, pitched a new idea every week, got rejected and until we were able to find our idea and made it work. Instead of starting everything from scratch and going back and forth with ideas, we narrowed down the target audience and the project scope, which helped us form the project.
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While I was working alongside the art direction manager on the UI, the project also helped me to gain experience in art direction as it was important to find design principles that could fit seamlessly with Moleskine’s branding while creating a friendly environment for the audience. This project has helped me professionally as well, as this was a large-scale project in a short time frame. It allowed me to think more rapidly, and develop more clear design decisions.