FortySeven Media + Food Blogger Pro have a long history together. Bjork & Lindsay reached out many years ago to ask about how we had created our own membership site, and we helped them setup a bare bones version of their own. Since the design and architecture was based on ours, it was a cost effective way to get them up and running.
We tweaked a few things over the years, but as their community has grown, it was time to re-think some things and create a design that was all their own.
The goal with this design was to create a fresh new visual brand without going back to the drawing board. We kept their logo and core colors, tweaking them just a bit to be brighter and friendlier. Where the real change came in was typography, icons, and styling.
It was important that this new look and feel translated across all aspects of the site - from the marketing and sales pages to the membership area, courses, and forum. And that the entire site felt like a cohesive whole, not just a bunch of separate areas pieced together.
This meant thinking through site architecture, navigation, user flows, and visual cues so the user always knows where they're at and what to do next.
Working with FBP was so much fun. They listened to all my crazy ideas for re-organization, gave incredible feedback, and worked closely with me to make sure everything turned out just right.
Food Blogger Pro was in desperate need of a design that reflected our vibrant and connected community. We reached out to FortySeven Media to help us translate our ideas into tangible designs that our team could develop. They were receptive to our feedback and willing to iterate on designs until we got to a place where we were all happy. The end result is a site we (and our members!) love. It feels like us, which is exactly what we were hoping to achieve!
Bjork Ostrom / El Capitán / Food Blogger Pro
To guide Food Blogger Pro as they re-built their front end and started using the new brand in other applications, we created a comprehensive styleguide and designed high fidelity mockups for all major pages, handing it off for them to implement.
We included:
The result is a clean, modern feel with a high focus on legibility, hierarchy, and the user’s experience. We love it!
The course area of Food Blogger Pro it’s marquee feature - a video library with hundreds of in-depth lessons and resources. Making it easy to find, track, and navigate that much content is hard. And the original design wasn’t cutting it anymore.
Working with their development team, we designed new user flows and course tracking capabilities that gave the user clear indicators of where they were in a course, a way to mark lessons as complete, and visual cues for what to do next.
This combined with a visually consistent course tracking tool makes knowing what you’ve watched simple - so you can easily pick up where you left off.
If the courses are the marquee feature, the community forum of Food Blogger Pro is it’s beating heart. With thousands of discussions and users interacting every day, the forum is the most actively used area of the site.
Of course, discussion boards are historically full of great information, but often visually cluttered and hard to use. We worked hard to design a forum with clear visual hierarchy, logical organization, and a consistent visual language so that the community feels like a natural extension of the membership area
The final area of the site that needed re-organization was the user’s account. Again, the biggest challenge was finding a way to visually tie several modules together using persistent navigation, current page highlighting, and consistent styling.
Now users can easily jump between each area of their account, and know exactly where they are.
With more and more people using mobile devices, it was important that the design translated to all screen sizes. 47m created high fidelity mockups for each page layout on desktop, tablet, and mobile, making sure to work through important UI/UX issues at smaller screens sizes.
The result is a design that works on all devices so users can learn how to start, grow and monetize their own food blogs on the go!