Pinch:

  A Women's Lifestyle Media Platform
2016

Pinch website was my very first large-scale project.
As the only designer in the team, I laid out the website structure from scratch and created the visual style.

Goal

Pinch is a media platform for women. Since it was launching for the very first time, it needed a website built from scratch with a strong visual identity. The webpage layout and the content hierarchy should be different for free users and premium users.


Colors

Brand Identity Color

brand color
main gradient



Category

I created color schemes to color-code each category.



Life
Tech & Gear
News
Entertainment
body
Fashion & Beauty






Article



Main Page



My Pinch








Mobile Web










Pinch Club

Pinch Club is the paid membership plan for premium readers.
This webpage was designed for Pinch Club's promotion.



Conclusion & Reflection

The do-or-die environment of a startup allowed me to push through my comfort zone and boundaries. As I had no previous work experience back then, I feel extremely lucky to have been given a full discretion for a commercial project. Taking full and sole responsibility allowed me no excuse to back away from any work that's needed to be done, and this shaped my way of approaching design projects.

Although Pinch platform is one of my proudest projects, there are some aspects I had to pass because of the time limitations. Usability testing is one of those: for future improvements, I'd take a time to actually sit down with the readers and observe how they experience the platform. Another thing I could have done differently is designing mobile interface first. Even though I knew mobile environment should be the first thing to consider, I designed desktop interface first and then modified the layout for mobile devices. Other things I'd like to explore more in the future are adding microinteraction, providing more interactivity to the reading experience and a feature to post questions to the author.

One of the many things that was incredibly rewarding about commercial projects was that I could hear back from actual people. Below are some of the tweets I found about the website's design.