eCommerce, Website, Design System, Living Style Guide

Hilti

The tiny country of Liechtenstein is famous for three things; money, mountains and machinery... specifically Hilti‘s power tool machinery. Hilti, the Apple of the professional level power tool industry briefed me and my team with the task of taking their ageing e-commerce site and turning it, in conjunction with a brand refresh, into a streamlined design and shopping experience.

My task was to take the updated brand and reinterpret it for the web in such a way that the 36,000 products that Hilti have to offer were presented in the best possible light and accessible to not only the big wigs at head office but also the site managers with patchy internet connections - site wide design optimisation was the goal and of course the solution.

All Systems Go!

The final design solution was an atomic design tour deforce. Built from scratch and structured around a rock solid pattern library and custom living style guide, where ever atom, molecule, organism and template was lovingly tested, groomed and documented. What we ultimately produced was such a future friendly and water tight system that even Brad Frost himself would have been proud.

Heavy Machinery

The site is visibly solid, borrowing from the logo and utilising angles of the tools themselves. This visual language was designed to speak to the target group and communicate the same message of strength, reliability and simplicity that the tools themselves communicate. Taking it one step further the site was designed to also have a “bare bones” mode that removed all the visual excess if a very slow load time was noticed by the server, which is often the case when you‘re stuck
on a construction site in the middle of nowhere (we developed this concept 3 years before PWAs became trendy).