The Honda project was another role at Digitas which saw me working closely with the creative director to define and develop new modules to support the product offerings across the UK market.

Predominantly designing for the UK motor vehicle range, the modules would also be utilised across the bikes, marine and powered product ranges. 

The design language of Honda is very strong and was fully established in this agile environment. My role was to extend the design language into further module which could support interactive elements with the page structure and also present new feature of the forthcoming product ranges. 

Photography is at heart of the brand language and utilising this was key in the presentation of new features. The art direction approach was to take a more familiar magazine style of presentation and format this for digital, ensuring that they everything was fully responsive.

Presenting the information in this way had some challenges around the placement and ordering of the content types when addressing the responsiveness, but it was successful in retaining the quirky nature of the honda brand. 

One aspect which I wanted to achieve was to bring some of the more interactive site elements into the main product experiences. All vehicle brochure ware sites usually have options and specifications that you can configure, but these are usually presented in a separate product or application. I wanted to bring some of these elements into the page to give a flavour of the widened experience on offer and lead the users through the journey.

One of these modules was the simple colour picker which would be the starting point to full customisation, and the access point to helping a user on their journey to potential ownership.

When designing the simpler product modules we thought about the flexibility of content placement so that the layouts never felt stale or repetitive across the product ranges. This also helped with the type of photography that would be potentially used and meant that there were less restrictions needing to be placed on the type of imagery provided. 

Each of the content positions in the modules could be used for pure typographical elements or more contextual descriptive content that could be used as a call out for a specific product function. 

Whilst working on the design language I identified issues with a number of icons used in the modules. The specific icons used in the project were a result of different designers using differing specs to define these. I took it upon myself to initiate an audit of the numerous icons used across all the honda products and standardise the creation process. 

This meant rebuilding the majority in vector form and, at the time, creating an icon font for them to be used in the interface and modules.