Responses by Cheyenne Thayer, marketing manager, Imagination International Inc.

Background: Our tagline has always been “the marker for everyone” and honestly, our audience of students, teachers, crafters, architects, fine artists, comic book artists, tattoo artists, fashion designers, product designers, fly fishermen truly reflects that. Our goal was not only to build a new, easy-to-use website but also focus on catering relevant content to our diverse types of users in new and interesting ways.

Highlights: Definitely the COLLECT and FEED sections of the site. Under COLLECT, users can find all of our Copic colors in one concise color grid, as well as our marker sets, paper and other products. Then there’s the FEED section, a new content delivery concept that we’ve been working on for some time now.

Challenges: Definitely the COLLECT page. This has been an interesting user experience challenge for the team. Our Copic markers are available in four styles, 358 colors, and up to nine nib options per marker, in addition to being refillable, which makes the system really complex. Visually communicating all of those aspects in one view in an elegant way was definitely not easy.

Navigational structure: We wanted to make Copic’s collection items, as well as rich content, the focus of our new website.

Anything new: This was the first big creative project our internal creative agency tackled with our development team and it was definitely a success. We worked together to translate creative direction into logical code. We’re excited about what we were able to accomplish within our timeframe, and we hope to continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible with code and creative.

In addition, since our last site was clunky and hard-to-use, we’re now using a CMS and platform templates with extensive documentation and support, which have been heavily modeified by our developers. The site building experience happened ninety percent faster than the last version of our site and it’s pretty solid. We don’t expect to encounter any difficulties updating our site in the future and our user account system is better than ever.