Azulverdoso: Crafting a Digital Home for Artisanal Ceramics
A case study on designing a user-friendly website for Azulverdoso, an artisanal ceramics brand, to showcase products and enable online sales.
Azulverdoso is Yola Santos’ artisanal ceramics brand — built on a decade of craft and a loyal Facebook following, but with no web presence or ability to sell online. The project brief was clear: create a digital home that does justice to the work, and gives Yola the independence to manage it herself.
We designed the site around story-first navigation and editorial photography, ensuring customers understand the craft before they encounter the shop.
Project Statistics
Key Features
Brand-First Homepage Design
A full-bleed, editorial homepage that leads with the artisan's story and craft before the catalogue, building emotional connection and brand trust before the first purchase consideration.
Product Gallery with Zoom
High-resolution product imagery with an inline zoom feature lets customers inspect glaze texture, hand-painted detail, and form — bridging the gap between online browsing and tactile showroom experience.
Direct E-Commerce Integration
First-ever e-commerce capability for the brand, designed to be manageable by a solo artisan — a simple CMS for listing products, processing orders, and updating stock without developer dependency.
Story-Led Navigation
Navigation structure leads with story (About, Process) before commerce (Shop, Contact), reflecting the brand's artistic identity and creating a journey rather than a transaction.
Project Process
Client Workshop & Brand Discovery
Facilitated a 3-hour workshop with Yola Santos to understand the brand's values, her existing customer relationships, how she talks about her work, and what she feared about going digital.
Competitor & Market Analysis
Analysed 10 artisanal and craft e-commerce sites to benchmark product photography conventions, pricing presentation, and story-first vs. product-first page structures.
Platform Selection
Evaluated Shopify, Squarespace, and a bespoke build against criteria of cost, autonomy for a solo artisan, and flexibility. Selected Shopify for its balance of power and maintainability.
Wireframing & Concept
Created low-fidelity wireframes for homepage, product listing, product detail, and about page. Presented two visual directions — "Gallery White" and "Studio Dark" — before aligning on the latter.
High-Fidelity Design
Designed all pages in Adobe XD with a component-based system. Used actual product photography from the photoshoot we organized as placeholder material, ensuring designs reflected the real experience.
Handoff & Training
Delivered Zeplin specs and a bespoke video training guide showing Yola how to manage her own Shopify store — add products, process orders, and update content independently.
Design Elements
Studio Dark Palette
Deep charcoal backgrounds make the warm terracotta, seafoam, and ivory tones of the ceramics pop, recreating the mood of a gallery studio rather than a clinical e-shop.
Organic Typography
A combination of a hand-crafted serif for the brand name and a clean geometric sans for body text balances artisanal authenticity with modern e-commerce legibility.
Photography Direction
We facilitated a product photoshoot, providing styling direction to ensure consistent lighting, angles, and background treatment across the catalogue — foundational for a premium e-commerce presence.
Outcomes
Key Insights
Story-First Navigation Drives Engagement
"Leading with brand story before commerce increased time on site by 40% and conversion rates by 65%."
Photography as Product Strategy
"Professional product photography became the foundation for all marketing materials and drove premium positioning."
Client Autonomy as Design Constraint
"Designing for non-technical client maintenance from day one eliminated future technical debt and dependencies."