Disrupting wedding cliches with Lyst

Hot off the success of our collaboration on the Lyst Year in Fashion 2018, Lyst approached us to support them on their next instalment of data rich trend reporting–this time the spotlight was on wedding fashion.

Our brief

With last year’s royal wedding, the big ‘I do’ has been a hot topic in the world of fashion. From bridal trends to attention grabbing guest attire, there’s no shortage of reporting on the biggest fashion event of the calendar.

However as the only global fashion search engine, Lyst pride themselves on their status as the definitive source of what’s hot in fashion. So when it comes to weddings, they well and truly have the scoop.

A disruptive design language

As bold in design as they are in fashion, Lyst wanted a design language that would separate them from rival wedding reports.

To the design team here at Maido, this was music to our ears. With over 200k weddings a year in the UK, it’s a surprise that the graphic language surrounding them is not more progressive. Weddings are still largely represented with script fonts and ornate floral visuals, and rival reports fail to break this mould.

We crafted a visual language to mirror the edgier wedding trends represented in the Lyst report. The colour palette blends traditional pink with a bold dark green to challenge wedding colour norms, while bold typography brings a confidence that traditional delicate wedding typography lacks.

We also introduced bold illustrations and graphical patterns to bring a unique identity to the report, alongside Instagram devices to echo the social led content.

Performant, accessible and responsive

Our Year In Fashion 2018 project gave us a strong base to build from. We used React as our tool for building out the site and it gave us its familiar, friendly development experience but also allowed us to reuse code to improve parts of the codebase where time constraints would have prevented us otherwise.

Unlike Year in Fashion, however, Wedding Reports had more creative layouts that differed between each section. This meant that we had more work to do in building the skeleton of the page but also let us deliver unique presentations of each category.

React recently had an update that included a new feature called 'Hooks'. We used this extensively in the project, especially with React Spring with which we built fast, smooth animations throughout the page.

Our combination of reusing old code and using the new features of React led to a performant, accessible and responsive page that delivers a great experience for the end user.

The results

The Lyst Weddings Report launched on Tuesday 26th March and has already had some great coverage from the likes of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, The Evening Standard, The Independent and Forbes.

We’re keeping a close eye on performance in the hope we can smash coverage targets once again for Lyst.

Watch this space.