Eskapee
Tell the real mountain bike story. Stories we hope you get lost in and stories that make you want to ride. A brand with purpose.
Year 2015-16 Agency Craft Store My Role UX/UI Design, Brand Design
Project goal
Create a new mountain bike media website that respects and pays homage to mountain bike culture so that the real story can be told.
My role
I’m a moutain biker, my friends are mountain bikers. I have worked in mountain biking in one way or another for 13 years. When I was approached with to opportunity to design something like Eskapee, it was a dream.
I led the design of Eskapee in late 2015, then again as the platform was iterated and new features were added in 2017. The project included discovery, naming, brand strategy, identity design, and UX/UI design.
The team consisted of the editor (founder), full stack developer, and myself as the designer.
Name
We started with a name that encapsulates everything the project was trying to achieve. ESKAPEE. It represents the action of why people ride and the alternate way the brand tells the mountain bike story. It’s about escaping from the mundane, the expected, and the exploited. It’s inviting. It asks people to join, to become Eskapees, and to seek the alternate.
Eskapee was built because we love mountain biking, and we wanted to tell the mountain bike story a different way. We’re one of you. We ride bikes, and we drink the occasional beer. We are writers, photographers, designers, and content producers. We really love the ride, the lifestyle, and the culture of mountain biking. It’s that feeling you get when you’re on your bike, far away from the world – we eskape physically, mentally, emotionally, and metaphorically. Eskapee is about the places, trails, travel, experiences, people, friendship, fun, journey, adventures, and that feeling of riding a bike. It’s about telling the story with the best photography, videography, art, and words.
Branding
A simple visual language was created to tell this story. An unobtrusive design approach, that strived for communication over decoration. The logo represents the spiritual home of mountain bikes.
Content
A call was put out to the best photogaphers in the mountain bike world. We want to tell stories like this, and this was your opportunity to tell the mountain bike story how you see it.
We are simply building a platform for a story to be told. Grand stories, small stories, stories with heart and a soul. Immersive content.
We want photos like this with headlines like this.
Social - promotion
Because in the initial launch the stories would only be released on the website once a month, social channels were leveraged to spread the word about Eskapee.
The instagram following grew quickly. This proved the respect that users have for original content.
The website
The site was designed to be full width across all screen sizes. Making full use of the photography and not constraining it. We wanted the viewer to dream into the images and imagine themselves on top of the mountain.
Because we knew that we would have a lot a fantastic content to display, the visual look and feel of Eskapee needed to be simple.
Designing moments with layers
We wanted to try and show the feeling of a page turning. The content was seperated into sections and when the section ended the content rolled over the new content. As a page turn does.
