Client and competitors
Ceramica is a distribution company established in the mid-80s Quebec. Like many in their industry, their competitors’ websites look alike and feature room scenes with typical black, white, or neutral pastels, and cluttered layouts overloaded with text and graphics:
These sites feel busy yet uninspired, lacking creative or disruptive direction. To stand out, Ceramica needs to break away from this conventional bland and dull approach to design.
Brand and User Personas
Ceramica needs to appeal to their clients: buying groups, retail stores, and contractors. They don’t work on commercial projects with architects and designers that they have to be different from or appear fresh to. They could very well become that design-forward distributor for their design-oriented dealers and be distinct from their competitors and their boring sites that lack colour and personality. Following their acquisition, Ceramica would be receiving a lot of high-end designer products. And, it’s in the name — “concept” is design, an idea, an abstract model we conjure up in our minds.
Best Practices
Lets do some trendspotting on Apple Design Awards, Awwwards, Behance, Dribbble and other sources of inspiration:
You can see lots of stunning monochromatic designs with abstract 3D shapes on backgrounds of similar colours: General Electric, Google, Loaded eSports, Max Mara, Mercedes, NexBank. Some of those abstract shapes don’t feel appropriate to their brands. How do we turn a non-objective shape into an on-brand visual element?
The design
It’s a 3D model of the brand pattern on a monochromatic background. The monogram at its heart serves as the focal point for the design, tying a comprehensive programme of interconnected products. The text reads “Conceptualise with Ceramica”:
And not just that, they design and carefully curate their selection of handpicked products to not overwhelm their customers with many identical options:
This shows that Ceramica is a company young at heart and passionate about tiles. They’re not too corporate. They value every customer and maintain close personal relationships with them. They’re more flexible than the big guys and unlike them, Ceramica’s reps are the decision makers and problem solvers:
Homepage video
About Page
The ‘About’ page features scroll animation where the heading disappears between the buildings, brand colours and patterns:
Contact Page
The ‘Contact’ page features mouse-move animations on a blurry map where users follow the arrows to find their showroom:
The blog page is minimalist and clean and has headings, large featured image, image gallery, social media buttons and footer.
