Project Background

 iFonty.com  is an international font distribution company, based in Los Angeles, CA. They offer a large selection of Latin-2 (Eastern European) fonts. iFonty.com specialize in professional fonts by Bitstream and Monotype.

My Role

I was responsible for the design process: from conducting the research, through wireframing and prototyping, usability testing – to the final product delivery. I also prepared wireframes and prototypes for their internal tools. The application was written using Ruby on Rails and hosted on AWS infrastructure.

Since speed of development was of essence, iFonty.com wanted to use the popular and proven Bootstrap framework. I needed to work within Bootstrap's framework constraints – I could only use existing UI components. This made the website usable on mobile devices without any additional front-end development. I coded a working prototype directly in Bootstrap using HTML and CSS, which was later reused by the engineering team in the final product.

In addition to delivering high-fidelity mockups of the app, I was also tasked with designing company branding and logo, so that everything would have the same look and feel.

My Design Philosophy and Process

I design simple and practical solutions. I believe that design should not get in the way of user interacting with the app. Ideally, the final product should be as instinctive and straightforward as possible. I spend a lot of time drafting and simplifying my designs until I feel I reach a “minimum lovable product”.

I based my process on the 5 staged of design: empathize, define, ideate, design, prototype and test. If possible, I like to receive feedback from the engineering team early on in the design phase, to make sure I don’t design features that are technically costly to build. My front-end experience allows me to deliver CSS stylesheets that can be reused by the engineering team with minimal changes.

The Final Product: