Overview
In 2009, I was contacted through Zero Coordinate Inc/Staggering Creative to do a website redesign for Project REDSOKS, an AIDS charity movement started by fashion photographer Rayzor Bachand in memory of Gia Carangi.
What became immediately apparent, however, was that the project was struggling with its own identity and that it needed an overhaul from head to toe.
The Challenge
There were three core questions to face in redesigning the REDSOKS brand:
1. How do you share the blazing passion of the models and photographers with the audience they're trying to reach?
2. How do you portray high fashion with women who aren't wearing clothes?
3. How do you put the connection between red socks and AIDS into words that will move people to action?
Over the course of 17 years, Project REDSOKS had gone through some very successful periods and touched the lives of countless people, but by 2009 both donations to the cause and sales of prints had fallen off sharply. REDSOKS hadn't held a major gallery show or event in several years. The public's interest seemed to have peaked and waned.
It was time to turn things around.
Identity
With the challenges in mind, I sat down with Paul McMillan and Natalie Bulkley of Staggering Creative to brainstorm. The more we talked, the more we needed to be able to answer the question "why socks?"
Finally the answer came: "Everyone wears socks. Everyone is at risk."
The moment we said it, we knew we'd found the thread that would tie the project together.
Our message toolkit for Project REDSOKS encompassed a common vocabulary of the project and guided the remainder of the work with a focus that had been sorely lacking before.
Logo
Despite the outdated-website, inconsistent branding and stuttering sales, the first thing that had to go was the old Project REDSOKS logo. In a preliminary survey, the most common image associated with the original logo was Japan's "Rising Sun" flag. No one indicated any connection with either fashion or AIDS prevention.
The new logo needed to embody the strength, freedom and passion of the models while presenting a modern, edgy and fashionable aesthetic.
What I came up with was a tri-tone logo set in the very modern M+ font family silhouetted against the figure of a woman striding forward joyously. The silhouette itself came from one of the REDSOKS prints which I converted to a vector illustration. Her short hair and striking pose gave the logo the edge it needed to stand out, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
Site Design
My direction from the client was "modern and high-fashion, with the ability for people to buy prints online."
Since the gallery was going to be the core of the new site, I decided to seek inspiration by going back through the history of Project REDSOKS' gallery shows. I was struck by one particular event in Philadelphia where the clean white walls of the gallery had been painted with a pair of red stripes which ran above and below the hanging prints.
The layout needed to be clean and the colors needed to be bold. Building from the new logo, the vision of these two red stripes, and the project's bold new message, it was merely a process of iteration to hone in on a design that could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with fashionistas and activists alike.
The gallery section was also an excellent opportunity to try out some of the more recent CSS3 features such as border-radius and box-shadow.
Coding
With the design firmly in hand, I set out to contribute a brand new gallery module to the Valhalla CMS (of which I'm a core developer).
The module needed to have a fairly large set of core features, including drag-and-drop gallery reordering, automatic thumbnail resizing, support for nested galleries, metadata, and the ability to integrate with a shopping cart for purchasing prints.
Writing the database models was a snap in the Django framework, but creating the drag-and-drop admin turned out to be a significant undertaking. jQuery UI provided the drag-and-drop and ajax frameworks, and ultimately the interface had an excellent UI/UX.
The gallery module has since been incorporated into the McMillan & Keller Photography site (currently under development) and has attracted interest from several other clients.
Results
Launched in October 2009, the site redesign was a huge hit, garnering rave reviews from long-time supporters of the project. The client was extremely pleased with both the site design and the admin which he could update at will. Traffic growth was steady, spiking to over 20,000 views per month shortly after the re-launch without a single hiccup on the server.
Promoting Project REDSOKS is an ongoing endeavor, and kick-starting their public visibility is the next phase. New events, new partnerships, and new products are all in the works.
If you'd like to support their cause, please consider purchasing a print or contacting Rayzor to make a donation.