Introduction

SottoZero is a ski sport club based in Trentino.

It has two teams:

• Team Internorm Alpenplus Trentino (professional)
• SottoZero Nordic Team (amatorial)

SottoZero already had a website, but it needed to be refreshed to reach modern standards and to better manage content.

Problem

The request included different functionalities:

• Showcase team members
• News
• Gallery of images or videos
• Links to previous skiing seasons

No mockup was provided; only a sketch of the three main pages and possible routes / information present.

Starting from the sketch, I worked to both the design and development.

I first had a look at other competitors' websites, so that I could better understand the world of ski clubs. I wanted to see how news were presented, common design patterns, types of fonts and the general "feel" they gave.

Team Robinson

Team Futura

Apparently, a usual color is blue. Some other websites were old and presented information mostly with text. More recent onces instead made a better use of space and fonts. They also used lines or blocks to categorize information.

Two teams had to be showcased, each with different needs:

• Team Internorm Alpenplus Trentino: the official professional team, sponsored my Internorm & Alpenplus, with a red official color.
• Sotto Zero Nordic Team: the amatorial team with the same orange color from the SottoZero ski club.

Development

I decided to use a "squared" design: mainly using rectangles and defined borders to create groups of information. This design, if used with the right colors and contrasts, would have provided a straight-forward, easy to read and modern look.

I chose to use light blue as the main color, which is complementary to orange (the main color of the club). The client asked for red in pages that were about the Internorm Alpenplus Team, but it didn't really fit with the color I chose, so I tried to minimize it when possible.

Black and white were used for the details, icons, text and some buttons.

One main problem appeared: light blue is the color of their main competitor, and they wanted to change it in order to be more "unique" and identifiable.

Other than that, published content could be related to either one team or both.

Solution

After a few discussions, it was decided to change the main color to orange.

A light and dark mode was provided to keep up with the majority of users that are getting used to dark-mode websites. It was also an option to switch off all the bright colors of the two teams.

Home light

Home dark

The client appreciated how content (like news, gallery and events) related to one specific team (or both) was presented differently (red, orange or white/black for both). It solved all the problems they had with their previous webiste.

Red is associated with Team Internorm Alpenplus, while white stands for both

They also found it very easy to manage content through the included admin dashboard.

Key takeaways

Working as a freelancer means working directly with people, and working with people often means more things to manage.

Clients usually know what they want, but don't actually know what they want. You are the one that has to understand their problems and solve them. This is either because they don't have the language to explain themselves, or because they barely figured how the final product should be.

It's important to communicate the reasons behind your decisions and why they solve their problems.