COP Practical: Initial Responses

Upon reviewing the existing football section of Adidas's website I started to think about how to make the page more gender neutral/inclusive. Initially I thought to include both men and women in football however when analysing the website further I felt the whole design of the page was very masculine. This lead to experiments looking at how to showcase the existing information and products in a gender neutral way by making the products the focus rather than the professionals, as lots of the collections are inspired by male starts so by removing their faces I wanted to see if this would create a more neutral aesthetic (see figures 1-6).  Throughout these experiments product photos have been used, taken from the Adidas website in order to create a more realistic representation of how the site could look. In addition throughout these experiments I've looked at the use of colour (see figure 1) as I think this can be a main indicator as to the implied gender of a piece of design or product, choosing to use black and white as the main colours as this is very gender neutral whilst also fitting in with Adidas's existing brand/ aesthetic (see figures 2-6). Furthermore the only colour comes from the products themselves which for these experiments are the different boots available, with both male and female products being used where possible, as some lines only feature boots for men. When designing the different layout options (see figures 1- 3) I considered keeping the design quite simple so no gender associations could be drawn from the design, leading to the use of Circular Std for the typeface as this is quite an even typeface which is bold enough to show the power and dominance behind the products but no so bold that it alienates female customers. In relation to the design itself 18.1 has been used as the intro page as previously 'deadly strike pack' has been featured to introduce the different ranges, however I felt the use of 18.1 (see figures 3-4) had less of an aggressive undertone but also includes each sub-range, which are featured below the images (see figure 4). I've also experimented with different ways to show the explanation of each sub-range choosing to feature it over the photos as this created a cleaner finish (see figure 5-7). Furthermore if this was to be coded customers would click the photos to shop and hover to read the description. 

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Figure 7