StockCC

Back Story

StockCC.com was my university business idea which supplies editable stock images in the form of PSD files. These files have been specifically created to enable designers to have full control over editing and better fulfil their requirements. I have extensive experience in this field and wished to create a better product for end users. Like many designers I have used stock images in some of my design projects. I have also contributed to both Getty Images and iStockphoto.com for over 5 years.
I found this project exciting, and good feedback from the Transmedia Show gave me the drive to turn StockCC into reality. The design work for this project included a website with mobile version, a promotional video and branding, along with my business plan and financial forecast.

Brief

My brief for StockCC was self-set, however, my goal was to get the business to a stage where it was able to be started. In order to achieve this it required a business plan, branding, web designs (to a stage where they could be developed by a developer) and promotional content. StockCC is a stock image library that sells editable PSD images to designers and other media professionals. Because of this a clean style was required for all branding to achieve the attention required by the target market.
Website requirements
The requirements for the website were to have a content managed site that could sell large volumes of images and have room for the site to expand. The website had to appeal to designers who are the main customers and be responsive so the website could be accessed using mobile devices.

Research

I started this project by looking at other sites that sell images such as iStockPhoto.com I particularly wanted to find an attractive way of displaying many photos on the page. This was the main creative difficulty of the design. IStock uses a simple grid system, each cell is the same size and images are places in the cell. This causes wasted space and means that images with an irregular aspect ratio are compressed to fit the cell making them hard to see. I then looked at other sites that have large amounts of images. My particular favourite is Pinterest. Unlike IStock, Pinterest uses a dynamic layout that fits the cells to the image. I believe this is a far more attractive way of displaying images and therefore selected this style to become the main layout of the design.

Design

After my research I began by creating a number of wireframes for each page including mobile mode. The wireframes were then tested and adapted before the final layout. There are only a small number of layouts required as they would all use the same basic CMS template.

Above is the main layout for the site with different size example tiles to show how they would interact with each other on the fluid layout.
A number of user flow diagrams were also created to allow me to improve the user experience.

This shows the roadmap of a user purchasing and downloading a file.

High-fidelity Mock-ups

High-fidelity mock-ups were created for each page and the files could be used to develop the website.

Promotional Video

Along with the website a range of promotional content was created such as this video that shows how an end user can edit the files.