Case Study: Ethical Elephant
An Ethical Beauty
& Sustainability Blog
With an encouraging, kind, and authentic online presence, Ethical Elephant serves to be a resource for women, inspiring meaningful habits for positive change. The owner pours her heart and soul into Ethical Elephant’s resources and active online community, with thousands of articles, product shopping guides, brand directories, and other resources – all with the aim to educate and empower women to begin to live their lives with ethical practices and sustainability in mind.
The Objective
After years of building up an extensive readership and active community, the owner came to us looking to refine the appearance of their online presence, and reposition their blog from focusing solely on cruelty-free (CF) and vegan beauty to a more inclusive CF and vegan resource for beauty, fashion, sustainability, and home products.
Our client’s blog was already well-established, with a very friendly and positive brand personality. Wanting to emulate this within the new brand identity and website design, we developed an uplifting and inviting color palette of warm hues that complimented their already recognizable rose color. These colors also served to induce a sense of calm, reducing stress and overwhelm that’s often associated with conscious consumerism.
Using a custom typeface, the primary logo combines rounded serifs and letterforms to create a feeling that’s both approachable and inviting, embodying the idea of a circular economy in a sustainable world.
We expanded the brand’s visual language with a collection of brand marks and icons, to add interest to both their online site and active social media, and create a sense of consistency and recognition between both platforms.
Primary Challenge
One of Ethical Elephant’s distinguishing resource is their Brand Directory, which their readers use to determine what products are ethical and worth buying.
Before, it was difficult to use, and clunky to look at. We wanted to optimize the directory for better usability for their new site, so we created a place where readers can filter and search for brands in a variety of categories, by country, value, product, or alphabetically. Now, instead of a bullet-point list, the brands are displayed in a clean grid with images and custom icons indicating whether they are CF, vegan, sustainable, or not.
Secondary Challenge
The previous site lacked organization and ease of use. Our second challenge for the new website was to introduce a site architecture and method of organizing that was intuitive for both our client and the readers. We needed to account for thousands of posts in 20+ categories while also allowing for room to grow from a cruelty-free beauty blog into a larger resource for ethical consumerism and sustainability in beauty, fashion and home industries.
With this in mind, we re-organized the site into four general categories, using the four primary brand colors to visually distinguished between the categories by color, allowing for immediate and easy recognition throughout the site. We also added a Resources page to house all resources, a Products page, and the Brand Directory. With the new site visitors can easily find and explore topics or categories of interest, search and filter ethical brands, find resources, shop sustainable products, and more.
Want to see more images from this project? Check it out in our portfolio.
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