Zeplin Interview Project
Project Artichoke
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Project Artichoke 〰️
The assignment: Create a landing page and additional assets for Artichoke, a hypothetical product produced and soon to be released by Zeplin.
Combine product, business goals, user expectations and come up with high-fidelity visual designs to tell the story.
Art Direction + Visual Design
Website Layout Design + Prototype
Brand Design + Implementation
Artichoke is an intuitive whiteboard device and software that matches your ideas, sketches, and wireframes to existing components of your design system in Zeplin.
Zeplin was created to bridge together essential design and development phases of the creative process for quality digital products by bringing designers, developers and their teams into one connected workspace. But what about all the necessary steps before design and development can happen? Zeplin’s newest product, Artichoke, streamlines the ideation phase, bringing your brainstorming sessions to life while simultaneously eliminating hurdles from the design and development processes.
Why artichokes?
Artichokes are a very sturdy vegetable with a tender heart at their core protected by thick strong layers of leaves. Each layer is connected and related to the next leaf and the leaf before it, just like our own lives—each moment is connected to the totality or whole of us. Artichoke leaves are likened to the symbolism of “emptying” the ego, clutter and layers we no longer need, moving from hard to soft and roughness to tenderness and simplicity.
Product Insights
The best tool for designers is time—more time to think, to dream, to create. More time, more magic.
Design can be fun, childlike in imagination, playfulness and creativity. Artichoke takes focus off of building elements, and gives designers back time to truly create. Artichoke gives you back time by eliminating cumbersome steps of the creative process, allowing you to focus the passion behind your projects.
Everything in design is connected.
Just as each leaf of an artichoke is an extension of another to make up the whole, Artichoke is an extension of the creative process—connecting the essential ideation and brainstorming phases together with design and development.
Artichoke elevates workflow.
What used to take days, now takes minutes. Artichoke takes hand-drawn wireframes, and turns them to high-fidelity designs in a fraction of the time. Artichoke’s software matches your sketches to existing components and elements of your existing design system in Zeplin, saving you the time of redesigning and building them from scratch.
Artichoke makes the power of design accessible to all, letting it truly supercharge an organization. By drawing simple shapes and wireframes, Artichoke software recognizes elements and components from your brand’s existing design system, giving the power of design to those with even the most minimal skill.
Artichoke Brand Style Guide
Logo
To reflect on Zeplin’s use of a blimp relevant to the name, I decided to not look too abstractly on artichokes themselves, and took a dive into a more literal translation, especially given that artichokes are very unique and recognizable in their form. I saved down swipe of drawings and photos of artichokes, studying their colors, it’s flower, fractal shapes and nature elements.
I was inspired by the curves and layers, the multiple connected pieces making up the whole and protecting the heart inside, connecting back to some of the symbolism research I had done.
Color
The Artichoke brand color palette is and intersection of Zeplin’s own’s colors with those that reflected my exploration of artichokes: greens, yellows, oranges, and purples. I decided on my set of grays and whites, no stark blacks as a tie-back to the Zeplin brand, but choosing Milky Way over Teflon as it went more with the color scheme.
Gradients also became a key part of the Artichoke brand—blending of colors and textures, as artichokes do in nature, and as layers of the design process blend into a whole or composition
