Darlington Snacks
Objective
Better User Experience For Increased Retention
Darlington is a family-owned commercial bakery that’s been around since 1982. In the late 90s they started expanding to provide nutritious snacks for schools, eventually establishing a dedicated line of whole grain snacks developed for schools and daycares to offer all-natural, clean-label baked goods. Today, Darlington Snacks has three health-conscious product lines—Appleways, Crave-n-Rave, and Darlington.
Darlington Snacks wanted their brand and online presence to reflect their growing product offerings and expanding reach. Branding was the first milestone in addressing these concerns—we wanted to give the brand a playful character while maintaining its integrity. For the website, Darlington Snacks was looking to create a more intuitive and streamlined site visitor flow, improve product findability, and enable ecommerce functionality.
Identity system design
Stakeholder Interviews/Surveys
Information Architecture/UX
E-commerce
Custom Post Fieds & Types
Custom filtering system
move the slider left to right to see the before & after
IDENTITY SYSTEM
Darlington Snacks operates in two locations—Joplin, Missouri and Indianapolis, Indiana. To generate a sense of pride and differentiate between the two locations, we proposed a focus on one of the two primary colors in their palette for each location—this distinction would apply to everything from stationery to business cards.
COLOR PALETTE
The inspiration for the color palette came from the ingredients used in the Darlington products—we wanted to bring some vibrant energy to the brand while keeping the colors “earthy” and “edible”. We also wanted to set Darlington apart from the other companies in this space.
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ICONOGRAPHY & ILLUSTRATIONS
Throughout the site, our goal was to foster that warm home-y feeling to convey the family values of the company, and we brought it to life through curated hand-drawn iconography and custom illustrations for each of the flavor profiles for the cookies and crackers that Darlington Snacks offers.
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Mixed Berry
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Blueberry Lemon
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Veggie
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Ranch
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Lemon
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Blueberry
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Cinnamon
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Strawberry
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Nacho
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Raisin
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Vanilla
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Sweet Potato
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Cheddar
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Apple
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Granola
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Assorted Flavors
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Cocoa
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Chocolate Chip
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Shortbread
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Sugar
Select a flavor
Crave-n-rave
Appleways
Darlington
CUSTOM POSTS
Each of the snacks had specific information required to be presented on the individual snack pages, I.e. item number, UPC number, spec sheets, info sheets, nutritional information, other available flavors of the item, and more.
We created a custom post type to include all this data and an organized and easily digestible way. Additionally, we’ve customized the archive (list) view of all products to include and make accessible the most pertinent information both for the customers and the brokers.
"I don't even refer customers, distributors or brokers to the site (...) it is broken and old"
Ladies, this is amazing! I love it! The layout is great and the flavor selection is very intuitive and interactive when the selected flavor appears. Thank you so much for working so hard on this!!!
