OVERVIEW
YEN Studios is a multidisciplinary creative studio focused on storytelling through personal design, visual art, podcasts, and editorial content. Their website now showcases these creative forms under a cohesive brand identity that is still actively evolving.
I was responsible for building the digital foundation of their site, delivering 22+ custom components while adapting to a constantly shifting visual direction. Across two rounds of testing with 7 participants, all 3 comparative testing participants preferred the redesign over the original.
EVOLVING BRAND AND UNDEFINED DIRECTION
At the start of the project, YEN’s brand identity was still taking shape. Their aesthetic and philosophy center around creativity across all mediums, encouraging exploration through design, sound, and storytelling. Multiple designers were refining the look and feel at the same time, which meant the visual direction kept changing throughout the project.
My challenge was to design a digital structure that could evolve alongside the brand. A need for flexibility towards new content was a priority to not sacrifice the usability or cohesion with too much personal design implementations.
DESIGN CONSTRAINTS & ALTERNATIVES
The team envisioned a highly interactive site, but their existing Elementor setup on a shared server could not support that level of animation without performance issues. I migrated the build to Bricks Builder, a lightweight visual editor that generates cleaner code and faster rendering. I also created a backup environment on Digital Ocean with higher RAM allocation to reduce risk during development.
COLLABORATION AND ITERATIVE PROCESS
Each meeting brought new creative ideas and multiple revisions, so I introduced structured feedback sessions to align on visuals, content hierarchy, and functionality. Originally, YEN's site relied heavily on page-to-page navigation with minimal use of the primary nav bar, making it difficult for users to understand the site's structure.
To resolve this, I built a comprehensive site map to help the team visualize the full information architecture, identify redundant page paths, and clarify navigation flow. Typography, spacing, and layout components were also refined throughout this process.
GRAPHIC DESIGN
The design system merged YEN’s editorial and digital aesthetics directly to their website. I built clean, magazine formatted layouts for their articles and creative showcases using grid structures to balance imagery and text.
In addition to layout design, I created custom graphic elements to implement across pages. Simple yet expressive visuals that maintained readability while reinforcing YEN’s message of creative freedom and multi disciplinary exploration.
TEMPLATES AND CUSTOM CSS IMPLEMENTATION
To ensure YEN Studios could maintain and expand their site independently, I developed a library of reusable page templates and content modules that can be interchangeable across different pages. I structured these modules to work seamlessly across desktop, tablet, and mobile viewports, ensuring a cohesive experience regardless of device.
Beyond this, I custom coded CSS animations outside of the capabilities of the Bricks Builder options as per the previous usability testing requests to enhance user engagement without compromising performance.
To reduce the risk of data loss and increase in creation performance, a temporary backup site using Digital Ocean's hosting services was needed.
PRIOR A/B TESTING
Initial A/B testing against the original site revealed clear usability gaps.
Users struggled to differentiate between YEN's diverse content types due to inconsistent formatting/unclear navigation
The revised prototype outperformed the original in both comprehension and navigation
Minor feedback around transition effects and scroll interactions guided the next phase toward balancing YEN's expressive feel with usability
PRE-FINAL RESULTS
The final site addressed every gap identified in testing and set a strong foundation for YEN's continued growth.
- Usability and brand coherence showed major improvements across both testing rounds
- Visual hierarchy was clearer and load times were faster
- The structure now supports seamless integration of future podcast and editorial content
- User feedback reflected that the platform finally felt like a functional yet expressive studio website where sound, storytelling, and design coexist under one cohesive creative identity
FINAL SITE CONCLUSION
The final site showed major improvements in both usability testing and brand coherence. Load times were faster, the visual hierarchy was clearer, and the structure now supports seamless integration of future podcast and editorial content as YEN continues to expand.
User feedback emphasized how the redesigned platform finally felt like a functional yet expressive studio website: a digital space where sound, storytelling, and design could coexist under one cohesive creative identity.