Responses by Responses by Ky Coffman, creative director, Outline

Background: Red Clay Hot Sauce was ready to expand into new markets and capitalize on its fast-growing reputation. It wanted a smart, fun and intuitive e-commerce website that would serve consumers and retailers alike.

Highlights: It begins with the belief that something can be simple and engaging at the same time. Users can order hot sauce almost immediately upon reaching the site, but in doing so, they are exposed to this bold combination of color, oversized typography and asymmetric layout of visual elements, with photography by Amanda Greeley. The style is inspired by the hot sauce itself—a burst of personality that doesn’t overwhelm the underlying dish (or in this case, the website).

Time constraints: For any D2C company, but particularly an emerging brand like Red Clay, the website is the business. It put us into an entrepreneurial mindset with the client. In this case, it had everyone really staying committed to the bold look while trusting us to marry it with engaging interactive details. No one had time to second-guess it to death.

Navigational structure: Simplicity. There are always more stories to tell and more design choices we’d love to include. But in the end, it’s about respecting the audience and offering the right balance of form and function. For example, the navigation hides on scroll, but reappears as users go up, marrying the convenience of a sticky navigation with the screen space that is fixed to ensure an uncluttered but accessible browsing environment.

Technical features: The site is on Shopify, our preferred platform for e-commerce. It affords us design flexibility on the front-end while delivering ease-of-use for management, a must for smaller retailers that don’t have the bandwidth for any digital complexity.