Project Overview

After overhauling the brand identity for the parent company, ideaLEVER, I needed to make its Content Management System brand fit into the new look and feel. First, refreshing the logo to fit into the new ecosystem. Then I set the groundwork for the UX and UI of the CMS backend manager.

Contents

1. Identity Design
2. UI Design

Art Direction

Identity Design 

An evolution instead of a complete departure

Each of the CMS logos for CommerceCM and SiteCM has a complete opposite brand, which didn't make sense because they often existed in eachother space. Most customers were using SiteCM and CommerceCM within their same website builds. Trying to continue the idea of making the logos an evolution like the ideaLEVER rebrand was important. Some people loved the SiteCM wedge, but it was incredibly hard to apply to anything. The CommerceCM had a similar idea with a rectangle with an older style pinched corner that made the logo look lopsided. So I tried to mould the 2 shapes together. The result is the CM being wrapped with a simplified rounded square reminiscent of a page icon. After all, using a CMS is all about empowering anyone to be able to manage web pages as simply as they would edit a text document. Some finer details make the look cohesive with the chosen font. The angle of the page block matches that of the "t" characters cross-bar. The "CM" is a slightly heavier weight to offset the appearance of it being lighter in it's reversed treatment.

UI Design

Updating the backend interface

SiteCM has been around for over a decade, and so has it's interface. While perfectly functional, prospects were turned off by the "old and clunky" look to the interface. It had unnecessary information scattered everywhere and an inconsistent way of managing similar types of content. I went through an extensive inventory of all the components of the manager to tackle the biggest parts first. What came from that was a completely new blogging component customers had been requesting. I decided to use a format that most prospects were comfortable with but optimizing it for the extensive library of professional level tools SiteCM offered.

Credits

Art Direction: Lea Gucciardi | UI & UX Design: Lea Gucciardi | Application Front-End Development: Conrad Macintyre | Back-End Development: Jeramy Marshall & Derek Luce