Dolby Redesign
Dolby has been a globally recognized innovator of sound, image, and voice technologies for cinemas, home theaters, PCs, mobile devices, and games for years - but when it came to their online presence it was hard to tell their pedigree. Along with a small team I worked with Dolby to create a beautiful responsive marketing platform to help humanize their technologies, launch their first consumer products and elevate their brand.
Our first design challenge was to craft a new visual system to capture the magic and cinematic quality of Dolby.
Some of our visual inspiration
Dolby came to us with a vibrant color palette to work from and we quickly found ourselves drawn to washing these colors over large documentary style photography. It was also important to Dolby for their site to stand out from the consumer electronics competition.
After digging into the visual language and site structure we started isolating page templates and modules that needed to be designed. Between the three creatives on our team we split the work and started getting real with the content.
As Senior Designer, it was up to me to stress test the visual language we created to find it's limits. We had limited development resources to realize this website so we had to get creative in brainstorming simple responsive solutions to any problems that came up.
Simple was the key word on this project - once finished we were handing over the keys and wouldn't be there to help Dolby populate the site with real content. That meant that we needed to consider how every image would be cropped at each breakpoint and ensure character counts could be flexible enough to account for all they needed to say.
In the end we created a system of 12 page templates and 30+ modules made for them to self-sufficiently keep the site updated for years. Being in a collaborative team allowed me to have a hand on every page design and a majority of the module designs.
“Dolby’s new, responsively designed website features a contemporary look and gives visitors an up-close look at how Dolby Laboratories makes audio, cinema and imaging experiences more powerful.”
The entire system we designed for Dolby
The site went live in early 2015 and we've had nothing but great feedback from our client. In fact we've since done two immersive experience pages based on this visual language.