Abbot Society —

Interaction, UI, Visual, Web design

I worked with Abbot Society to design their website to include a members-exclusive content hub for curious whisky enthusiasts.

Abbot Society is a whisky private equity fund comprised of a global community of investors.

Part brand touchpoint and part exclusive source for rare whisky information, the website requires an interface design that encourages user discovery and engagement.

Collaborators:

Content: Garreth Christopher
Development: JP Smith

Refined and exclusive visual aesthetic

The visual identity for Abbot Society draws inspiration from the fund's namesake (Abbot Kinney, a real estate developer in 19th century California) and the Venice Beach setting of its origin story.

It was designed to complement whisky's aesthetic, but not to mirror it (e.g., with amber or brown as primary brand colors).

View the mood board ⟶

Typography

Ovo, the site's primary typeface, is elegant with subtle serifs.

Montserrat, which is sans serif, is used for instances that call for smaller sizes (e.g., forms, dropdowns, eyebrows).

Colors

Abbot's signature colors are cool hues in richly saturated jewel tones that complement the color amber, a de facto brand color due to its prevalence in whisky imagery used throughout the site.

Abbot's Ocean Pattern

A nod to Abbot Society's Venice Beach roots and subtly reminiscent of splashes of spirits, custom-drawn ocean wave vectors rendered in the brand's main colors are used to add depth to backgrounds.

Interaction Design

Abbot Society especially wanted to establish a password-protected library dedicated to whisky tasting notes, financial information and news to be included on their website.

In determining how all of this content would be laid out and interact with one another, the team considered multiple ways to organize information. Across the entire user journey from logging in to reading a specific tasting note, the layout needed to balance information architecture and organization while remaining engaging and encouraging exploration.

Selected Interaction Considerations —

Incentivizing logging in

Recognizing that having to log in has an interaction cost (content is for members only), we communicate the value proposition of doing so by showing intriguing previews of the types of content available.

Global navigation

The whisky distillery "shelf" is an illustrated navigation that is present on multiple pages, making it easier to dive back to browsing and exploring after the user is done reading a specific piece of content.

Driving exploration and engagement

The landing page upon logging in presents a feed of recent posts for preliminarily browsing, relieving pressure on users to immediately decide what distillery or type of content they're looking for.

Information Architecture / Filtering

In anticipation of a growing catalog of content, ways to filter a potentially large number of whisky notes are included. Tags on posts also allow the user to easily explore more content in a certain category.