Heritage Hats
Brief:
Responsive website design & development
Timeline:
3 months, fall 2025
Skills:
Branding, responsive website design, html & Css
Brief
Heritage Hats is the largest hat store in Arizona. It sells a large variety of western-style hats and also houses a restoration workshop. Its current website was developed in 2013 and has not been optimized for mobile.
My goals were to create a brand for Heritage, design a new responsive site, and develop it with HTML/CSS.
Heritage values quality and consistency, and it has a strong connection to southwestern cowboy tradition.
Brand
Color Palette
I was asked to keep navy blue and tan in the final color scheme. Pulling from different elements of the southwest experience, I created three color palette variations. I decided to move forward with the third, which echoes the natural tones of Heritage’s hat leathers.
Logo Research
I decided to go with a traditional crest logo to highlight Heritage’s tradition and credibility. I gathered a moodboard of crest-style logos and considered which elements would make sense for Heritage.
In my visual research, I was seeing logo sets that took apart their high-detail crests to get to alternate versions. This is a great way to keep the crest high in detail while still having simpler versions that scale well. This made sense for Heritage, which doesn’t always have the real estate for a highly-complex logo.
Logo Design
I then went on to create concept sketches of my own. I liked the middle thumb on the first page, but it felt too old-timey for a brand looking to modernize; so I swapped the banner for a signpost. I simplified the full logo for vectorization and then reduced it into an alternate, smaller logo with just the name.
Website Design
Planning
I started off the website redesign with looking at the original website and pinpointing any specific issues. I quickly realized that creating a list was almost pointless because there were too many problems. The site really needed a redesign from scratch.
I created three user profiles to help me visualize my demographic for the redesign: a young musician, a middle-aged tourist, and an older hat expert. These three demographics capture the full range of Heritage Hat’s customer base.
Iteration
I created three desktop design concepts that varied in almost everything, except a few key screen layouts that I wanted to keep. I started designing mobile for all three, but ended up only finishing the concept I chose to move forward with (version 2).
Final Design
[commentary coming soon]
Development
[commentary coming soon]
Reflection
[commentary coming soon]
