Green Lifestyle Magazine Redesign
a blog theme (uncoded) project by dudup

Creative brief

The buyer added updates to the brief. Read them.

Company or Personal Name

Greenvana Style

What do you do?

Greenvana Style is the content arm of Greenvana, a Brazilian internet startup that also has an online store and other products related to sustainability.

We're an online magazine that covers everything related to an eco-friendly life. From green fashion to ecological gadgets, from celebrities and their green attitudes to tips and tricks to a sustainable way of life. Our team of specialists publish about up to 10 daily posts and articles, ranging from interviews to videos about these topics.

Do you have a desired website screen size?

1024x768 fixed, centered layout

How many blog theme pages do you need designed?

Four pages: the home page, article (single post/page), category and multimedia page (video/photo/infographic)

What is your industry?

Online editorial about ecology and sustainability.

Describe the target audience for your blog theme design

Women and men from 20 to 45 years old that likes innovative yet clean design and products and care about quality. the design should reflect our signature: more conscience, more attitude, more style - for a green behavior. Note that we don't talk exclusively with green consumers. We use our website to capture new clients as well.

What 3 things would you like to communicate to your audience through your blog theme design?

Mainly we like to show that green lifestyle can be sophisticated and cool. So to pinpoint 3 things I would say:
- Green is cool and can be chic;
- Eco is not a trend but a lifestyle that came to stay;
- Attitude goes with style.

Note: we fight the stereotype of "alternative" and extreme activism

What blog design styles do you like?

http://www.vogue.es/
http://lolamag.abril.com.br/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/style/
We like big pictures and an oriented image headline like these. The image should lead the hierarchy of the news and guide the user.

We also love the typgraphy on Elle magazine's iPad app (see typography-elle-ipad pngs attached)

What colors do you want to see in your blog theme design?

Beige, Khaki, Desert sand, off-white colors. Since the name of the website has green in its name, we should go for a sophisticated green details. The pictures should enhance the news.

What colors do you NOT want to see in your blog theme design?

We don't want a heavy colored interfaced, neither too dark nor too colorful as a carnival. We don't like too many black and brown in it. Of course it can be in lines or details

What adjectives should best describe your blog theme design?

Clean, unisex, minimalist, without being dull or boring.

What content must be included in the blog theme design?

We would like to have the blog template designed according to the wireframes attached for each one.

1 - Home page (home.png)

It should be totally image-led, highlighting our main content. We want a carrousel/slideshow that shows up our main headlines, along with the video box that would offer up to 3 videos (one of which is already playable from the start).

Below it, we want to highlight the most important news for each of our sections. We want 3 different rows, having 2, 3 and 5 boxes each, that we would like to mix up according to the moment (for example, one day we want to have 3 rows of 2 boxes, and on the other we may want to have 2 rows of 3 boxes and 1 row of 5 boxes). Our best reference for this is the Lola Mag site: http://lolamag.abril.com.br

There's also a panel with a sliced picture that shows related tweets to the subject of the picture when the mouse cursor hovers over each one, as in the tweets.png file (that box can be seen live at http://www.estadao.com.br/politica).

On its side, we want have a box with three tabs, each one showing graph bars for most comments, most read and most shared (as in engadget.png)


2 - Article / Page (single.png)

This is a very traditional article page. We want to have the ability to clearly identify to which section that article belong, and we want to have the ability to place a small banner on the side of the headline for sponsors.

On the sidebar we're gonna have list of articles, a widget with best sellers from the store, and some banners.

We also like to use Facebook Comments as our comment system, so please consider Facebook default colors so it won't visually clash with the layout (it's an iframe so it's probably going to have white background).

3 - Multimedia (multimedia.png)

This is a different template for media consumption, like videos, photos, infographics. Basically we want to get rid of the sidebar so the content can be seen without any distractions and with a lot more room.

We also plan to make the navigation using AJAX so the user will be able to flip from post to post by using the arrows on the side, or the thumbnails on the strip on the bottom.

4 - Category (category.png)

Just a regular Wordpress page of each section, with the ability of placing an image on the top of each one, along with a short description.

Other considerations:

- We're using automated image generation as possible, so please stick with a 16:9 aspect ratio as much as possible, since it's a good format for both pictures and videos. This way we can leverage Wordpress automatic thumbnails as much as possible.

- It's very important that the design of the header sits well with the portal toolbar (attached as portal-toolbar.png. The toolbar can be seen at http://greenbest.greenvana.com and http://style.greenvana.com.

Do you have additional requirements or links you'd like to share?

Some nice details that can be included like some very thin foliage and vine used as separators and horizontal lines, but used sparsely, with parsimony.