Illuminated Perfume
Illuminated Perfume is a small, one-woman plant-based perfumery owned by Roxane Villa. Roxane crafts divinely inspired, delicate fragrances from pure plant botanicals, using her background in fine art to create a unique take on perfume.
Roxana in her boutique in New Mexico
Web Design
While Roxane’s brand is well-considered and put together, her website needed to carry her story, aesthetic, and attention to detail that her perfumes did. This would be a website that would need to be modern and unique, while still remaining true to the roots of the brand, which evoke a sense of Egypt, ancient Greece, and Parisian perfumery in one.
Roxana’s solid perfumes are poured into finely engraved cases reminiscent of a bygone era.
Roxana’s samplers come with cards that look like some kind of old faded paper, sealed with locally made and beeswax in natural colors. Each sample comes complete with illustrated cards explaining each note.
Each perfume has its own story, emotional tone, and mood, and a piece of art to go along with it to help capture its essence. This is an art piece for a perfume Roxana designed called “Melliura“.
Style Tiles
I began with a style tile to get a sense of palette, typography, photo treatment, link and button states, and overarching brand themes.
Digital Layout
From there, I designed basic digital layouts for web and mobile.
Digital Layout Concepting — Web
Solution
The finished website repurposed the bones of her existing design, photography, artwork, storytelling used in her old WordPress site and on social media, refining and reworking the user experience to suit the audience’s needs better. Some inspiration and visual cues were taken from the artisan retailer Anthropologie’s website, which shares the same values of aesthetic, handmade quality and artisanship to bring this website to its fullest potential.
Homepage Redesign — Main
Homepage Redesign — About Section
What I Learned
This was a first attempt at hand-coding my own HTML and CSS, and I had a lot of fun exploring how customizable everything could be. This project taught me the importance of well-planned user research process to direct the design process. Since this was done for a Web Design class without any user research prior to the class, I really had a hard time coming up with answers to the questions about user needs, and found myself really wanting to spend more time on it and get real information to base the design on to be more strategic. However, I did learn a lot by not having the time to do this work, and enjoyed the challenge of coding things from scratch for the ability to do quirky and unusual things with hand coding.
