TM Lewin
Skills used: UI, Email design & coding, Art direction, Illustration, Animation
T.M. Lewin is a UK based gentleman's Dress Shirt and Tailoring retailer, founded in 1898. It has just under 100 stores in the UK, with new stores in countries across the rest of the world. I worked at the company as a digital designer.
Role: Digital designer
The role consisted of working daily within the E-commerce team to produce website landing pages, campaign banners, designing and coding responsive emails, update social media artwork and art direction in photoshoots.
Simplifying and introducing responsive emails
T.M.Lewin's emails were originally extremely long (sometimes over 4000px high) and very copy and product heavy, making designing and coding them very tedious and liable to mistakes due to the high turn around (three emails were sent per week). In addition to this the emails were awkward to read when viewed on the mobile.
Because I was the sole designer responsible for the creation of the emails I felt there had to be a better way for both the customer to view the emails both on desktop and mobile as well simplifying the production workflow minimising the room for error.
After doing competitor analysis at the time I felt the responsive email was a natural evolutionary step.
After taking a course in responsive email design I set about creating a series of responsive email templates which could be used on the thrice weekly email send out.
I focused mainly on bold typography and imagery and shortening the height of the email overall, thus giving the finished product a snappy, bold and classy feel. Customer feedback was positive and in some cases the emails generated profits unseen previously before when old emails were sent out.
Art direction and collaborating with in house photographers
The role allowed me to work very closely with the in house photography team in product shoots. This was great because it allowed me to define much more clearly my over vision of the site when generating emails, banners or optimising the site.
Illustration
There were certain times where illustration was more appropriate than photography. Having a natural love for illustration I jumped at the chance when there was an opportunity. This illustration below is for the responsive email sent out at Halloween.
Crystal Palace animated LED banner
T.M.Lewin became a sponsor for Crystal Palace one of the benefits of this was that we were allowed to advertise at their football stadium. I had the great chance of designing and animating a LED perimeter board advert in Flash for T.M.Lewin which was used at Crystal Palace’s Football Club, Selhurst Park stadium during games.
