The dealer fulfillment team at CDK created individual dealership requested hero images and often fielded requests for specific vehicles. This meant designers creating laser eye cats were also creating hero images for major car brands. We, the brand advertising team, would hear about this from our direct employees at those brands. Our team offered to help, and the more we looked into it, the clearer the need for a new product became.
I organized my notes from stakeholder meetings to get a better understanding of everything we would need to create a successful product.
Finding asset images for every year and model of vehicle was difficult. Quality lifestyle images could have limited backgrounds and car views. When no lifestyle image was available we used a vehicle with a transparent background from our database. This added another layer of variability we had to account for with templates.
Different wireframes were created to support vehicles on the left or right. When dealers had offers or smaller hero sizes were needed (mobile) we switched to transparent vehicles on solid backgrounds to increase legibility. I redlined the designs and worked with a developer to present the Volkswagen hero images to stakeholders.
With stakeholder approval I created a process to add more brands to the product. This started with asset gathering and the team assigned to it – creating a list of assets needed and how those assets would be handed off to save time for the development team. As the lead designer, I showed one team of designers how to crop and edit lifestyle images, and another how to style the template across different sizes. This included jointly approving the designs with specialists more familiar with those brands. I then worked with the developers to see that styling put into action. Finally I created an overall workflow for the directors of the teams involved, and created a board on JIRA to track progress and provide expected completion dates.
Towards the end of the project I stopped designing for additional brands and was only supervising for timely quality results. Here are a couple examples.
