ViaSnella.com
In 2009 I worked on the website for the Swedish fashion brand ViaSnella, run by Lina Zedig. It features a webshop, a brand overview and a blog.
We kept visual elements to a minimum and focused solely on product photos. This worked out great, much thanks to Lina Zedig’s great attention to detail, and her ability to deliver high quality clothes and photos. Since the launch, the site has been featured on a number of sites, including Smashing Magazine.
The Interface
When you enter the shop, you’re presented with a grid of all available products. As you hover a product, its title and price will appear in clean, white, boxes. You have access to some filtering options and your cart—but that’s it.
The startpage is equally simple. It features a big, clean fading gallery, with no text or words. Beneath it are three feature spots—leading to the shop, the story behind ViaSnella and the blog.
The blog is fairly simple; it’s a two column layout with the title and author to the left, and the entry to the right. Images are always full size.
Are We Going to Make it?
When Lina Zedig approached us to build a fully functional web shop for ViaSnella, we were sweating. This was a part of a course at Hyper Island, and Andreas Runsten, Anne Küther and I had just under three weeks to design, build and test the shop. Plus a blog. We weren’t sure we could even make it.
None of us had any experience building web shops. Maybe there was a plugin for WordPress? Magento? Bad call. After consulting Jonathan Briggs, we finally decided to run it on Shopify. Lina supplied us with all the photos we could wish for, and Andreas Runsten and I got started with the design.
I set up a local server running Shopify’s developer tool Vision and started playing around. Andreas and I tackled the design together, I dug into the code, and Anne took care of all the obstacles that could come in our way.
Shopify was surprisingly easy to develop for, and we managed to deliver on time. Lucky for us, and everyone, Lina Zedig keeps producing high quality content, and the site has never looked better.
Quick Summary
- Tools: CSSEdit, Vision, Coda, Photoshop
- Estimated time: 3 weeks
- URL: www.viasnella.com
- Team: Anne Küther (Project Leader), Andreas Runsten (Designer) and me (Designer, Developer)