All things digital for an outdoor adventure brand
A year in-house at Go Ape as Senior Digital Designer. If it was digital, it came across my desk.
- Role
- Senior Digital Designer
- Year
- 2024–25
- Worked with
- The marketing team and web developers
- Where
- In-house
- What I did
- Website redesignDesign systemPaid mediaVideoPrint
The brief
Go Ape had brand guidelines, but nothing that told you how to build a page. The website needed redesigning, and everything around it, from paid ads to print, needed to look like it came from the same place.
- 1
Guidelines into a system
Tighter type, colour and spacing rules, and components the developers could build once and reuse.
- 2
The website
A redesign built from that system, page by page.
- 3
Everything around it
Paid social, Performance Max, Google Display, print and video, all speaking the same language.
Building the system while building the site
My main job was the website redesign. Alongside it I turned the brand guidelines into a design system, so the developers had real components to work with rather than a PDF to interpret.
Doing both at once meant the system was tested on real pages as it grew, rather than written up first and handed over. If a component didn't hold up on a real page, it changed before it spread.
Adventure cards on the homepage. The same card turns up on location pages, search results and the adventure hub.
The activities mega menu, grouping every adventure by where it happens: high ropes, in the trees and on the forest floor.
Finding a location
Most visitors arrive wanting one thing: the site nearest to them. Search, the map and the location cards were built as one set of parts, so the homepage finder, the locations gateway and each location page all work the same way.
The homepage location finder: postcode search and a list that works alongside the map.
The locations gateway, built from the same search bar and card components.
Every location, its own mini site
Each Go Ape site is treated as its own small website: adventures, groups, planning a visit, reviews, jobs and FAQs, all inside one template with a secondary navigation to get around it.
The location page template, here for Aberfoyle, with the adventure finder carried over from the homepage.
What's on at that location, with booking one click away.
Everything around it
The same system carried into the paid ads, so whatever people clicked on matched the site they landed on. I picked up print and pre-press artwork where it was needed too.
Behind the camera
I shot and edited video for the brand, and I filmed a TV advert.
In the credits
The developers left a humans.txt in the root of the site, crediting the team that built it. I'm in there under Designer.
