Dr Hue – The brand and design concept.
Posted on | November 26, 2009 | No Comments
Right then, 6 hours ago Robbie wrote about the idea of shop by colour. Since then, we’ve built a brand onto that concept – Dr Hue. Mr. John Stiles is our design director for the 24hour-startup, and here he talks about Dr Hue as a branding and design concept.
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Branding
The name was definitely one of the hardest things to come up with during the day. After initial brain-dumping, keyword research and frantic domain searches we soon realised that our two main keywords ‘colour’ and ’shop’ were so difficult to shoe horn in without finding pitfalls. We needed something a little ‘different’.
‘Dr Hue’ was inspired by the thought that we needed a name that made us sound like the expert in all things colour. We like the fact that it is memorable, raises a smile and adds a slice of personality to our brand which should give us great stand out in a crowded market place and back up the more personal, emotional approach to shopping.
Once we had our name sorted the brand identity soon fell into place and a character to fulfill the doctor role was researched and found. The central character would also act as a signpost for the user to start their shopping and provides scope for a host of advertising/brand executions.
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Design
Using colour as the key component to the Dr Hue’s functionality posed a number of interesting design challenges. How would people enter the site, how would they browse and how would we present results in a way that was all about colour? The first step was to make entry as simple as possible so we present the user with a simple colour palette which effectively starts of the experience. From there on in things need to relate back to that colour – so we’ve included various devices in the design to enforce the chosen colour, including the Contents of the test tube, the current colour block and Dr Hue’s ‘belt’:
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