Lene Bjerre Design

Bi-annual branding 48 page magazine. My job was gathering all content, come up with ideas for how to fill about half of the pages, making my superiors happy despite disagreeing with them and make it all look cohesive, beautiful and effortless anyway. And of course the technical and boring stuff like making the document ready for print and communicate with the printers to make sure everything goes well.

Anyone who’s dealt with printing large quantities on a regular basis knows that a seemingly endless number of problems can appear between making the final document and holding the finished product in your hand. I’m always on standby during the printing process because experience has taught me that there are almost always some last minute changes or problems that need solving.

Advertising in many of the big home and garden magazines throughout Europe was a significant part of their marketing strategy. My job was to select the right photos for each ad and make everything look nice according to the Lene Bjerre brand guide.

When I first started this job, the company website looked outdated, cluttered and… well, cheap. A premium brand needs a better website, but in the meantime I gave the current website a makeover by simplifying the design and feature the seasons best photos prominently on the website. This is the front page of the retailer website with shortcuts to the most important pages.
I ended up working on the design of the new website/web shop, and learned how complicated and multi layered it is to design a website that’s not just beautiful but also makes it easy and intuitive for people to navigate the site.

If a brand has many thousands different products, all in different sizes and colors, there’s an endless line of catalogs that needs to be made. These catalogs contained primarily product photos and product information, such as product number, price (in several different currencies), barcode, etc. Most of the process was automated but I still had to spend a lot of time on making those kinds of adjustments that are both repetitive, boring and requires my full attention. If a photo is misplaced, a lot of people would buy the wrong product and when there are thousands of products (and product photos), you need to pay attention.
Honestly, this is probably my least favorite part of doing graphic design, but I’m glad I got the learning experience.