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
About the project
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: a place to sell merch, host longer-form content, and build something more permanent than a feed.
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 – and in what order. In conversations with the client, three clear priorities emerged: sell merch, tell the story of the project, and create space for ongoing content. That translated directly into the site structure: Shop, About, Blog.
From design to build
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.
I proposed focusing on a single colour family instead. The deep red had the right energy – friction and warmth in one. I adjusted the tone slightly 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 the space to grow.
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. Working with native Shopify components limits how much a structured design phase would have changed the build itself - but it would have made a difference elsewhere. The language and structure, for example, could have benefited from card sorting or user testing rather than being based on assumptions.
The 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.