Project 1: Collaborative project – Virgin Wines – Ready, Set, Design

We got back from the holidays with a burning motivation. As a group, we had another post-it note session where we discussed what the flows for each page should look like. We agreed that if it was on post-its, we would really focus on flow rather than get too caught up in the design details. Below are some pictures from that session.

From this point, my job was to start developing the events page. As described in the “Grape Rivalry” post, I was using Planque’s events page as inspiration, which I really leaned into. But before that, I wanted to understand what I was working with, so I made a quick paper wireframe to get a sense of it.

Since we’re making the events page have only two flows, there wasn’t too much to think about, and I was happy with the design on paper, so I moved onto Figma quickly. Now, I’m writing this retrospectively, and I feel my weakest skill is designing. You could tell this, I think, as I hadn’t even tried to do anything new here. If you compare it with the Planque site, I hadn’t just taken inspiration; I had copied it exactly. This eventually gets resolved by myself later, but for a bit of self-reflection, I was so averse to designing that I was basically stealing work here, thinking I was doing amazing.

At this point, I couldn’t really see it taking shape, so I went ahead and created a poster for the Edinburgh tasting to use as a placeholder to see what it looked like.

One of my biggest issues with Virgin Wines’ current events page was that the wine tasting in question is not clear enough that it’s an event. It’s sold as a wine tasting but gives the connotation that it’s going to be 10-20 people, which is not true. The tastings VW holds are for 300-800 people. This needs to be presented better. My thinking is that if we use posters, we could really sell these events as what they are: Events.

The next thing I had to focus on was the product description page. I used Dice as a reference for my design here after seeing them during my competitor research, and they had the clearest and cleanest event pages. At this point, I was pretty happy with the designs. How foolish I was!