Strictly

The Question.

How do you build an adaptable identity and robust user experience for an evolving company?

Strictly Import Motorsports is a garage and performance shop based out of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Over the last few years they have been growing exponentially, and with this growth many aspects of their business had to quickly mature to support this growth.

In the fall of 2014, they approached me and proposed their ideas. They had three main goals: A name change from Strictly Import Motorsports to Strictly Performance Motorsports, an ecommerce and Point of Purchase solution, and a new brand identity to support their new name and company direction.

The Team.

Me

Project lead, Web design, & Development.

Aaron Covrett

Design

Discovery

The Vision.

Strictly’s driving motive behind these major changes was their goal to diversify their offerings, market, and customers. They wanted to serve a larger audience, so they also had to create an identity that appealed to a larger audience.

Working with my designer, Aaron, we identified key issues with their current identity and built goals for their refresh.

1. Maturation

Strictly’s current brand was the brand they had utilized since their inception. It served them well in the beginning, but as the company grew, their niche identity, along with their name, was stifling their growth. So to best serve their new business direction they needed a brand that reflected their new values and goals.

2. Adaptable but Identifiable

The unique challenge with their brand was the fact that it had so many use cases. The solution to this problem is often designing for neutrality, but Strictly’s core ethos is anything but neutral. So we were faced with the unique challenge of designing for a dichotomy, to build a brand that was both adaptable but also identifiable.

3. Enhanced User Experience

In many aspects of their design, the user’s experience was poor. This experience was two-fold, the consumer facing side of the business, and the internal facilitation with their sales process and communication with their customers. We wanted to supply Strictly with materials to make their processes easier and design better tools for the consumer.

Creation

01

Logo.

The design process began with the logo. We sought inspiration and influence from the things that relate the closest to their company, vehicles. We dissected the varying structural forms of domestic and import vehicles, identifying the distinct lines of classic decals and stripes. In the end, we tied these forms into the more literal form of their S to create the base for the rest of their brand.

Images that inspired the logo form.

Some intitial logo concepts.

Final logo form.

Final logo.

Adaptable but Identifiable

To satisfy our goal of creating a brand that could adapt across many use cases, we took the base form of their new logo and used it as an artboard. As long as the structural outline of the mark stayed consistent their brand was allowed to flex and adapt to specific uses. And by introducing these illustrative elements to the logomark, Strictly found it’s voice.

02

Brand Guidelines.

To insure brand consistency and make the utilization of this new identity easier for Strictly, we assembled a brand guideline. This guideline took form as a 50 page booklet that detailed every aspect for the use of their brand.

03

Web Content Wireframes.

Strictly's current website was a solution they developed themselves using a hosted ecommerce service. Like their brand, this worked at first, but as their offerings and products expanded they quickly bloated their website to the point of unusability. So moving forward the focus had to be on the user. We had to design a solution that could easily handle many products and allow the user to quickly find what they were looking for all while being easily manageable for Strictly’s employees.

I began by analyzing what was wrong with their current solution. I graphed out the all important pages and product categories that were present on their site. And then I restructured the way they related and connected their content together and built out a consistent and adaptable method of organization that could easily expand with their product catalog.

04

Mockups.

Based off their new informational structure, I jumped in and built mockups that connected tightly to their new brand and would insure an improved user experience.

06

Development.

Utilizing magento and wordpress, I developed a robust system of product and content management that powers the site. This allows Strictly to easily change content and manage all aspects of their sales process on any device at anytime. This insures that their site always stays updated, current, and manageable so that the user can have a great experience on the front-end.

Implementation

01

Logos everywhere!

Shortly after the project's completion, Strictly began implementing its brand assets across a number of applications. Images of sponsored cars appeared online beside selfies of passionate customers sporting Strictly merch. Overall, the project received enormous support and met great public reception. Also, they really like putting there logo on things, so I take that as a job well done.

02

Reflection

In the end, I believe this project struck the perfect balance between versitality and character. Not only in the sense of the brand's visual assets, but also the in the direction that we launched their brand. We gave them the tools and ability to build a company that is focused on their users and devoted to what they love.