SYKY
One System, Every Surface
Art Direction
+
UX/UI Design
+
Product Strategy
+
Launch Strategy
+
Art Direction + UX/UI Design + Product Strategy + Launch Strategy +
THE BRIEF
Building From Scratch
I joined SYKY, inheriting a prebuilt microsite that had recently launched for a short-term company announcement. It was a launch relic, made for a moment rather than a company: fixed content, no room to navigate or move elsewhere as a user. I joined as Product Design Director, reporting to the founder/CEO and CTO, with a brief to take ownership of the existing product and grow the brand's digital offering and audience along with the company's vision and milestones.
The task was not to visually redecorate but to map and begin creating a meaningful destination for brands, users and prospective ventures that a fast-moving company could build on for years.
The work moved me into the next deliberate steps.
THE APPROACH
From a Throwaway Site
to a Foundation
The microsite had done its one job and had nowhere left to go. From day one, I quickly began to understand the site's mechanics and planned to explore how we could rebuild and refactor it to make it more reusable. This foundation would allow the team to continue expanding as SYKY's designers, services, and activities grew, rather than hard-coding changes each time the company moved forward.
Understanding the site also meant being honest about what was already broken. I ran the site and the wider customer journey through a "broken windows" pass, looking for the small, visible problems that quietly signal neglect to a user: a misaligned element, an inconsistent style, a broken link or a dead end in the journey. For a luxury brand, these details carry real weight because a user's confidence in the product is built or lost in them. Working with the team, we designed and shipped quick, targeted fixes first, steadying the everyday quality of the experience before the deeper rebuild.
This allowed the site to stop being a one-off announcement and start becoming a destination the brand could grow into.
FUTURE THINKING
One System, Every Surface
With the site steadied, I created the foundational style guide that everything after it would build from. It was designed to hold a single, consistent visual language across breakpoints and across every surface SYKY appeared on the website, email, social, print and the wider campaign collateral, so the brand felt like one coherent thing wherever a user, brand or partner met it. One source of truth for the design, and no fragmenting of the language as the company and its surfaces multiplied.
The system also paid back in speed and cost. As its patterns and components matured, the efficiencies compounded: development became cheaper to run, and new freelancers and employees joining the design and engineering team could be onboarded using a single, documented language and get to work quickly, even on the company's most aggressive deadlines.
THE EVENT
An Owned Audience, by Design
The final step turned passing attention into a lasting relationship. We designed a permanent email and social sign-up directly into the site, not a temporary pop-up, but a standing part of the experience that grew SYKY's first-party database and fed an ongoing email programme. It gave the company an audience it owned and could speak to directly, ready for every drop, designer debut and announcement that followed.
“We believe the next great luxury houses are designing for digital worlds today.”
ALICE DELAHUNT, founder & CEO, SYKY
(Sources: Jing Daily GlobeNewswire)
THE IMPACT
What It Set in Motion
