A digital-first, ‘living brand’ for a retail icon
Westfield runs around forty shopping centres across Australia and New Zealand. Before we got there, the homepage was a grid of tiles, and every tile contained a photograph of the outside of a centre. Hardly aspirational, and did not reflect that Westfield was ‘Designed for Life’.
Hero W for summer in the centres.
The ask
Rebuild westfield.com.au as the foundation for their connected customer experience based on ‘Designed for Life’, their new brand positioning, and re-conceive the brand at the same time for application across all digital touch points and the acres of screens across all centres.
Summer mobile home page with ‘summer breeze’ primary colour.
What I found
In our early research, what came through strongly was the concept of ‘My Westfield’. Shoppers tend to frequent the one that is most local to them, and that is, essentially what Westfield is to them, regardless of what might be on offer at other Westfield Shopping Centres. They know which entrance to use and where things are, and would almost never choose to go there based on a photograph of the exterior. In fact, many customers might not be aware of what the exterior view is like, as they might enter from a specific car park entrance at the rear.
A brand built from photographs of the shell was showing the one thing nobody came for.
Research also revealed that what happens inside is not only shopping. People come to be around other people. Some arrive to sit down, connect to the Wi-Fi and stay. For someone who might not see another person all day, a Westfield is somewhere you can be amongst other humans with no obligation to buy anything. It is the closest thing a lot of suburbs have to a town square.
Autumn desktop with ‘peony’ primary colour.
Spring mobile with ‘pale sun’ primary colour.
Spring-flavoured W for the mobile hero.
The styleguide
What we did
I oversaw the brand and the website design at the same time, running in sprints, each feeding the other. Most programs make the brand first and apply it afterwards. Doing both at once meant the brand was tested against real pages while it was still movable, and the pages were designed by people who knew what the brand was for.
The W from the logo was modernised and tweaked to became an aperture, a shape you look through at what is happening inside the centre, which is the drawcard for Westfield. In this sense, W is for window.
The work ran from interviews and UX through to the site itself, and out across every digital touchpoint Westfield had. The Westfield Plus app, the fifteen hundred SmartScreens and SuperScreens, the digital directories, email, the in-centre Wi-Fi, the hoardings and the signage. I also redesigned the gift card range, the most-gifted card in the country, so the work ended up in people’s wallets as well as on their screens. All of it built to be handed to a Westfield team that did not exist yet.
Rolling it across forty sites meant each centre had to feel like itself without becoming its own brand. We built patterns from the architectural feature inside each centre that people actually remember, which usually referenced something about the area around it.
Westfield is black, white and a red accent. Thinking digital-first, we gave the palette a third hero colour to be chosen every season, taking its cue from what was in the centres. Spring went yellow to sit with fashion and homewares. Summer went blue behind a campaign built around a family pool.
I art directed the photography, including two days on a shoot in country Victoria to ensure every frame would hold across every screen ratio we had to fill. I introduced cinemagraphs as a format so images that would otherwise be still had something moving in them, to reflect the ‘Designed for Life’ brand positioning. A ‘living brand’ should be alive at the smallest scale as well as the biggest.
Campaigns and content for the in-centre screens were run by an external production company, so I worked with them to build templates for every format. The site also had to let retailers publish into it, which meant designing for content we would never see. And I led a separate stream standing up a studio inside Westfield Tower in Sydney, drawing on the Fjord studio in Melbourne, so they would have a resident team to feed all of the digital properties once we left.
We designed first then wrote the rules afterwards. The brand guidelines took months, and they came out of what we had learned by making the thing rather than being decided in advance and hoping they survived intact.
One brand, every screen: westfield.com.au on desktop and mobile, the Westfield Plus app, push notifications, fifteen hundred SmartScreens and SuperScreens, digital directories, EDM, in-centre Wi-Fi, the Abuzz units and concierge
Where it landed
We launched forty websites simultaneously with centre-specific content, more than fifteen hundred in-centre screens, email, digital directories and the group’s app, with physical signage to follow.
None of it is there now. The marketing team moved on, the internal studio closed, and the brand went with them. The typeface we selected, however, lives on, which always makes me smile.
“I have worked with many agency partners for way too many years. I can honestly say I have never felt such a sense of collaboration and teamwork. It has frankly been difficult to tell where we ended and Fjord began.”
Phil McAveety, then Director of Customer Experience, Scentre Group
One of over 1500 screens to design for
What I’d do again
I’d do it all again. The challenge, the team, the client; this project was a true highlight of my career thus far for the scale of its ambition.
What I would do differently is the part I thought I had already solved. I built them a studio and helped them staff it, because a living brand dies without someone to feed it. What I did not build was anything that would survive the people who championed it leaving. A brand that depends on a team is only as durable as that team’s funding, and I now treat handover as designing for the organisation that will exist in three years rather than the one in the room.
Client
Westfield
Role
Creative Direction
responsibilities
Project governance Digital-first brand and guidlines MLP web and app design Motion design for POS, Abuzz and Smart screens Westfield in-house team capability uplift and studio design
DURATION
16 WEEKS PLUS 6 MONTHS ROLLOUT