project: Web and mobile design
role: Senior Designer, Art Director
duration: 2017—2023
client: Samsung.com — Mobile division
agency: Razorfish, Publicis Groupe
As part of the Samsung mobile team at Razorfish, I helped launch five generations of Samsung mobile products: flagship phones, smartwatches, earbuds, tablets and laptops. Working closely with the UX team and developers, we redesigned the home page, created a new compare experience, promoted the newly opened experience stores, and maintained the core website during and after the pandemic.
Big releases would typically have very long pages, sometimes more than 30 thousand pixels in height. The following is an example of one page, localized from the originals provided by Samsung HQ.
The Samsung design style guide was an internal document geared towards junior designers, strategy and other production teams. It covered all the good and bad practices, served as a general stylistic guide on page layout, photography styles, creation of new icons, preparation and handoff to development teams.
Samsung uses four distinct component systems, depending on the site section and the purpose of the page. The systems are mutually incompatible, have their advantages and limitations, and require a lot of familiarity to put them to good use. During my time, it was a mutual effort between visual designers and the UX team to develop them into a comprehensive state, create component libraries and templates, and work with Samsung's internal development team to iron out each component’s stylistic and functional nuance.
Redesigning the navigation was a separate track from the rest of the revamp. The existing navigation was compact enough, but plain, uninformative, visually lacking, and overall a great opportunity for showcasing. The project took a few weeks, lots of UX exploration, and resulted in a considerably more navigable menu with dedicated ad space, all at the cost of making a few more assets for each new product launch.
A new Compare experience was a grand cross-team effort to make one simple tool for comparing any Samsung phone either with another Samsung phone, or with one of a major competitor. The experience highlighted all major points of interest for the US market, all transitions were gently animated, phones were presented at accurate differences in scale, and updating the experience was as simple as cutting a few new assets for each release.
This is a small printed brochure prepared for Samsung's Bespoke catalog, the series of gas ovens and refrigerators with customizable colors.
