Over the two and a half year period when I was an Associate Creative Designer at L.L.Bean, I was heavily involved in the templatization of a few key areas of content.
First came the request to create templates for our Outdoor Discovery Program emails. While the emails had been very templated already, the goal was to develop a group of modules that would be created in HTML by our email partner, Coherent Path, and used as building blocks.
After analyzing emails from the past year, I was able to identify 5 potential modules that would establish a logical hierarchy: a primary module, a secondary module, a tertiary module, a customer quote, and an instructor quote. I then assigned standard type styling across all, and established sizes for image slices.
Now, moving forward, the ODP creation process is extremely simplified. Content planners simply need to identify which modules to use, and then designers will need to slice and deliver images. Overall, this exercise streamlined the ODP email workflow and will benefit all colleagues who work on these emails.
Second came the request to create templates for our Brand Content web pages. At L.L.Bean, we launched a Brand Content section of our site in 2019. It was a hub for tips, tricks, and how-to’s for getting outside. We hadn’t reevaluated the templates and layouts of those pages since they were launched, which resulted in inconsistencies over the course of two and a half years.
In the early spring of 2022, a team of designers worked on redesigning and establishing strict templates to keep a consistent look across that section of the site. As a part of this team, my role was to research competitors and identify trends in this type of content, and also develop two of the new templates.
I was a major supporter and the designer of a new header structure. We lead off the page with the title (vs. an image), limited the character counts for the title and subhead, simplified the breadcrumb experience, and added a read time.
I also supported a simplified hierarchy with limited headline structure options, proposed limiting images (unless we have quality images that add to the story), and proposed utilizing a “Related Stories” section with hover animations that was developed for another project I worked on, the homepage redesign .
These templates began rolling out during the summer of 2022, and can be seen here.