Difficult Women Collective

Developing a visual system and building a web presence for a brand that needed more than a feed.

Project

Web Presence & Visual Identity

Focus

Visual system, Shopify build, client handover

Timeframe

1 month

Tools

Shopify, Miro, Claude

Tools

Shopify, Miro, Claude, HTML/ CSS

About the project

Difficult Women Collective began as an Instagram project – unscripted conversations with women from around the world about identity, work, love, and everything society usually asks them to keep quiet about. As the project grew, so did the need for a proper home on the web.

I came on as a freelancer to make that happen: translating an existing brand identity into a fully functional Shopify store, developing a visual system, defining the site structure, and building everything from scratch through to handover.

Difficult Women Collective started as an Instagram project – a space for unscripted conversations with women from around the world about identity, work, love, and everything society usually asks them to keep quiet about. As the project grew, so did the need for a proper home on the web.

I came on as a freelancer to make that happen. The brand identity - logo and colour palette - was already in place. My job was to translate it into a fully functional Shopify store: developing a visual system that could actually hold together, defining the site structure, and building and setting up everything from scratch through to handover.

Defining what the site needed to do

The first step was figuring out what the site actually needed to do. In conversations with the client, three clear priorities emerged and laid the foundation for the site structure:

  1. Sell merch

  2. Create space for ongoing content

  3. Tell the story of the project

The first step was figuring out what the site actually needed to do. In conversations with the client, three clear priorities emerged and laid the foundation for the site structure:

  1. Sell merch

  2. Create space for ongoing content

  3. Tell the story of the project

Site structure with the three main sections Shop, Blog and About

Making the palette work

The existing brand identity gave me a starting point – but also a challenge. The client had briefed five colours: a soft blush, a dusty rose, a deep red, navy, and black. Individually they had potential, but together they felt too polished, too put-together for a brand that lives on tension and not fitting in.

The initial color brief and first mock-ups

Let's focus on one color

The deep red had the right energy – friction and warmth in one. So I proposed focusing on a single colour family instead and built a UI colour palette around it. The result is a system that feels intentional and lets the stories do the talking.

From first component to handover

With the structure and visual system defined, I built the store in Shopify – working primarily with native components, with customisations where the standard building blocks weren't enough. Beyond the design, I also handled the full setup: product data, system emails, and a handover that left the client ready to run the store independently.

The Final Solution

The result is a fully functional web presence that gives Difficult Women Collective a home beyond the feed – a shop, a story, and space to grow.

View Live Site

Reflection

Coming into this project, I could draw on my background as an ecommerce manager and Product Owner - planning a full Shopify build, handling configuration, thinking through handover: that all mapped directly onto experience I already had. What was new was the creative side: developing a visual direction and building a coherent system from scratch.

The project also predates my formal UX training. A structured design phase would have made a difference - the language and structure, for example, could have benefited from card sorting or user testing rather than being based on assumptions.

The typo hierarchy and interaction states are where I see the most room for improvement. Knowing more about UI and accessibility now, I'd pay closer attention to the contrast between active and inactive navigation elements, and make sure text buttons have clear visual feedback.