Lead designer for an online experience for the Financial Times's, 'How To Spend It' magazine. This was an exciting project as the Razorfish team worked in-house with their editorial team for 6 months. They wanted a luxurious and unique experience to support their brand. We came up with a solution that combined uninterrupted reading and with rich media content in a 3D space.
How we approached the project
We believed the main challenge for How To Spend It, was how to reproduce the luxury of their glossy large format magazine to an online experience. This was 2009 and their competitors (Vogue, Vanity Fair,The New Yorker etc) online experiences, all had a similar look and feel - text/link heavy and boxed in by banner ads. The iPad still hadn't been released and mobile sites were general reduced to text and gifs. It was the Kindle that had recently been launched in 2007, that caught our attention and inspired us to look to separating out the elements of the articles. Let text be read alone without clutter and allow the user to control the font size and contrast. Let images and movies be viewed full screen alone without distraction.
CORE READING FEATURE
GALLERY EXPERIENCES
EXAMPLES OF 3D FASHION ARTICLE LAYOUTS
IMAGE GALLERY FULLSCREEN MODE
Smaller features
How to Spend It also has many smaller articles and guides, such as the, 'Eclectibles'. These needed cut-out photography and a different look and feel. We felt it would be best on a lighter background, where the objects could playfully come into focus. It had a lovely movement in the transitions between each objects
PRODUCT IN MOTION
VIDEO OF THE LAUNCH OF HOW TO SPEND IT ONLINE
Steve Thompson, the Creative Director of Razorfish/Avenue A, discusses the creative and conceptual strategy behind the digital edition of How to Spend It, the Financial Times' award-winning luxury magazine. Filmed at the Financial Times Digital Luxury Seminar at the Beau-Rivage Palace Hotel, Lausanne, Switzerland on October 8, 2009.