Responses by Tomoya Sasaki, art director, PARK.

Background: To renew Amino Mason, a popular haircare brand in Japan, we refreshed its brand site as well as designed new packaging and promotional materials. The purpose behind renewing the brand was to make its character and experience clearer. Until now, Amino Mason’s target audience was women in their twenties and thirties. In Japan, many haircare brands for women are girly and funny. In order to reach a wider range of people—including men—we emphasized an overall unisex tone and manners.

Design core: To create freshness. To bring up feelings. To evoke a sophisticated, marché-like experience. These key visuals express the core of the brand through depth, contrast and the usage of typography. From the customer’s first glance, I wanted the site to create a positive atmosphere.

Favorite details: The photo parsing, the typography and the parallax animations that bring them both to life. Photos were taken in a way that would allow customers to easily visualize each of the product’s features. Typography is used as a spice to make the design iconic. The animations first focus on the comfort of scrolling. We took care to ensure the simple design would not feel too monotonous.

Challenges: In order to enhance the product while keeping the color palette minimal—since there are many elements of the product that must appeal to customers, like characteristics—it was necessary to strengthen the site’s design elements and make the conductors easy to understand, so as not to overload it with chaos. Therefore, we considered the site’s structure as a three-dimensional hierarchy, classifying the elements as photographs, copy and navigation to be arranged on each layer. We devised to make the site easier to understand by giving it an invisible three-dimensional effect. This presented an additional challenge, because we also had to tune the animations—the speed of scrolling and the timing of appearances—to give the site that effect.

Navigation: We made the header compact so as not to disturb the site’s browsing experience as much as possible in order to let you enjoy the worldview by carefully watching the visuals and to read the product features in a spacious space.

The opening and closing of the navigation is designed so that it can be stored compactly. In addition, this site is not limited to brand experience, but it has the aspect of leading to the product’s purchase pages, so I fixed it to a place that is easy to find—and where customers can impulsively go to the online shop.