The making of the Refinish Autolak website

We start by planning the interface. Describing user interaction scenarios and building a table of functional elements.

Starting to work on the design. Making the first attempt.

Art director: This looks like an exercise in website design. It must have a concept, an idea, an emotional image.

Trying again.

Art director: I can’t see what can come out of it. You need to make a step to the side.

The designer goes to a training session for colorists and car painters to study color matching and surface finishing technologies and features of products of different brands.

Trying a new approach: taking colors with beautiful names (Autumn Sunset, Alpine Snow) and using them to paint the entire website with the car.

Art director: There. Now it’s starting to look like a concept. But you need to push it further. Make sure that behind the names there are real products with links to relevant catalog pages. Then it will become clear how we should draw the illustrations and what should be the source of our ideas. You also need to make a step forward in regard to the content: remove the dated formal slogan, for example.

Developing, trying different variants.

Preparing a set of key mock-ups and presenting to the client.

The client approves the concept.

Starting to work on final mock-ups, thinking we can make the design more clean and simple. Inviting another designer to join the project.

Working on the catalog and product pages.

Hypothesis: nothing is stopping us from showing large pictures of products directly on product pages. Assembling a prototype.

Art director: Go ahead.

Writing rules for photographing products for the catalog and waiting for the client to send us the correct high resolution images.

Now it’s time for technical graphics.

Making sketches of objects and defining steps for their coloring.

Discussing the objects with the client and starting to work on their visualization.

Using the renders to create frame animation.

Now for the internal objects.

Refinish Autolak colorist creates recipes for mixing car paint to achieve the colors we have chosen.

Assembling and testing. Fixing bugs and correcting the layout.

Polishing all the small design-related things.

Done.