We think popular.
After the successful design and launch of three of Bauer's premium brands, I was asked to take on the huge task of redesigning Bauer's corporate website. The bold global re-brand, “We Think Popular”, was poised to roll out worldwide and the Australian office needed a modern, innovative platform to match. The main goal was to showcase the strength of Bauer's brand properties across diverse portfolios and ever-evolving publishing channels. The result is a highly visual, app-like interface, with smart media and advertising tools, that works beautifully across all devices.
CLIENT: BAUER MEDIA
ROLE
USER RESEARCH
CREATIVE DIRECTION
PROTOTYPING
PRODUCT DESIGN
Understanding the dynamics
We knew the site experience should serve a myriad of use cases. Visitors could be potential employees seeking opportunities, advertisers requesting a media kit, journalists looking for research, brands seeking partnership, or staff requiring communication tools. I interviewed people from many different functions of the business, and collaborated in workshops to develop models that would celebrate and amplify contributions from all departments. Out of this process emerged a structure for the new website.
The art of influence
We took Bauer's key brand visual and transformed it into a design system that reflects universe of popular culture they create every day. The interface is constructed of the same colourful squares, evolved into content components, and assembled into pages to build the platform. It's this visual language that allowed us to build the site quickly and consistently, bringing Bauer's brands, products and stories to life.
Bringing it all to life
I developed a system of flexible content cards to give visitors a quick glimpse of all the happenings and important stories at the Bauer headquarters and across the vast portfolio of brands. The cards provide users with an ever-evolving snapshot of the company, showcasing content and news from across Bauer's myriad business divisions and properties, uniquely tailored to what’s happening “now.”
Turn audiences into customers
Bauer Media has incredible relationships with audiences that advertisers want and need. One of the key goals of the site was to showcase the power of Bauer's portfolio to influence customers. We created a smart brand explorer, with convincing profile pages and a comprehensive Media Kit Tool that allows campaigns to be planned in minutes.
Powerful publishing
Collaborating with Bauer's editorial, research and press teams during the development process allowed us to build a fully-featured publishing system that provided tools to keep the site feeling dynamic, fresh and new every day - without disrupting their existing workflow.
““I engaged Amber for this important redesign project. She quickly proved herself to be invaluable and demonstrated a brilliant understanding of product design. This eliminated the need for an entire UX/UI team. I would not hesitate to recommend Amber and could not speak more highly of her.””
