Wizarding W —
Concepting — Branding — Art Direction — Digital — Digital Publishing
Client — Wizarding Worldz
Role — Senior Art Director
Company — Huge
Creating the new home for the fandom of the Wizarding World — The Wizarding World is one of the world's leading franchises with the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts stories/films being huge hits. The WW team tasked us with creating a digital product that both reignited old fandoms and brought them together with those new to the franchise to create a limitless, evergreen universe. I was brought on as a Senior Art Director right at the start of the design and build phase and continued to work on the project for over a year with a team of UI and UX product designers continuously collaborating together. We worked in a very agile way, testing and iterating our product which we defined, designed, branded and build from scratch. One of the key requirements that came from the vision and define phases was that the product would be highly content — driven, delivered via an app within which we could push the boundaries of what a franchise’s digital publication platform looked like.
Our Creative Statement
A bold, fresh and original experience combining cinematic use of colour and form with classical flourishes inspired by contemporary editorial.
CREATIVE STATEMENT
Magic comes to life through subtle atmospheric transitions while crafted elements bring authenticity, humour and warmth.
The goal
Create the No.1 connected fan experience in the world.
Content types & defining the card system
We worked closely with the WWorld content team and a research specialist over several sprints of testing and iterating to define which content types resonated well with fans, such as quizzes, interactives, and articles. The card format also allowed us to deliver this content indiferent ways, such as by unlocking, in "packs" or with geo-location. There were also several influencing factors to consider, such aspaid membership tiers, age or type of fandom. I then worked closely with the visual design team to define a system that could easily identify all these diferent types.
“Packs” of content
Another part of the solution was to have ‘packs' of themed content that could be curated by the content team and delivered weekly asmagazines. These proved very popular in testing but caused some navigational issues where users got confused as to where they were in the hierarchy. We prototyped some diferent options, and in the end we found that it was most successful when we opened the packs in a modal that included the title of the pack, had a small background change, and only had one way back to the feed by hiding the bottom navigation from view.
Interactive content
The card format also allowed us to deliver content in snack-size, interactive ways. We were lucky to be working with a franchise builtaround content, though we had to keep in mind that the majority of the fandom had already devoured everything that had been created before.
Badge strategy
As the content had a lot of interactive elements, and content types like quizzes and polls had tested extremely well, we wanted to capitalise on the gamification aspect and introducing a “badge” system to the user’s profile. We all worked closely with the content team and the developers to define a badge strategy that was both engaging and ethical, in-line with the brands’ core values.
Badge types
We defined diferent types of badges that could be received, I worked on all the designs, crafting one by one. With the UX lead we defined the percentages of each type that would be available, and specified ways in which the badges could be earned. We wanted to make sure that everyone’s badge collection was unique, which meant that many badges were contextual or geolocated.
Physical Badges
We also decided to create physical badges for paid members. When scanned, these would unlock the digital version inside the app.Although these were part of the paid membership, we still wanted to build afinity for them by making them feel well earned. We created a set of mechanisms that could be used in the franchise’s real world locations in tandem with the app in order to receive the badges.
