Retail Design

Grocery Tag Project

Creating static designs has it’s benefits- you know what all the elements and copy are before you start designing (hopefully), and you can determine how a composition is laid out based on those elements. Dynamic designs are much more challenging. You need to design fluid compositions that can take a variety of elements and text, insuring that the final product is legible and aesthetically pleasing.

When I started this project for Green Top Grocery, the current process for designing and printing each week’s sales tags was to type hundreds of tags and signs by hand, print them out with a laser printer, then hand laminate and hand cut each one to size. My goal was to redesign all the sales tags, take the product data directly from the inventory system, and automatically render out trimmed, shelf-ready labels using the store’s tag printer.

Tag Anatomy

The first step was to create rough layouts of the three main tag types: 1UP, 2UP, and 4UP. I couldn’t just put lipstick on the pig that was Green Top’s existing system, I needed to determine what data I’d have access to in the system and what to include in the final tags. After writing the all the JSON for the automations, I needed to ensure that “Eggs” for “$1.99” looked just as good as “Lucy’s Old Fashioned Vitameatavegamin” for “$89.95”, as well as manage the project on cleaning up the store’s data to make sure we had consistent information from product-to-product.

The final step was to link the inventory system together with the tag designs and calibrate the store’s printer to cut each label with absolute precision, hundreds of times in a row. By the end of the project, the store was saving enough money each week to hire two employees.

Developing a Design Language

In designing assets for Green Top, I wanted to ensure every promotion for co-op owners would be instantly distinguishable from standard ones. Anything geared towards ownership, owner rewards, or owner discounts was purple, while all other signage stuck to Green Top green. Yellow was used to highlight items that were on sale or promoted, while red was used sparingly to telegraph deep-discounts, doorbusters, or clearance items.

Corporate Design

Corporate Communications Can Be Pretty, Too

At Keplr Vision, I have been advocating strongly for beautiful and engaging internal designs. One of my most recent projects was designing, programing, and project managing a new system for custom supply order requests. Prior to my efforts, individual practice locations would fill out a form to request a design that was then emailed to a chaotic ticketing system where a person would have to read each request, categorize, label, then assign them to the proper designer- all while consulting a corporate directory. Once the order was complete, a relationship manager would download the files, write out an email, send it to the requestor for an approval wait for a response, then manually forward the files to production.

The new system that was completed in December of 2021 uses a newly designed form that allows us to create variables based on their submission to automatically categorize, assign, send approvals, and forward to the proper vendor for production. Utilizing these types of automation would be far less effective without clean, engaging designs that encourage the end-user to notice and respond quickly.