Essence Digital Cover Stories

Essence Communications

An immersive digital experience leveraging premium video, photo and interactive design to expand the reach of monthly magazine content to the brand’s online audience

2019

with Allyson Brown for Essence

Roles

UI/UX Design for Web

Web Development

OBJECTIVE

Translate ESSENCE Magazine’s monthly feature stories into an immersive, bi-weekly digital experience

Increase ESSENCE Magazine’s media impressions and social engagement

Position the brand as an emerging hub for digital media and experiences

CHALLENGES

ESSENCE’s digital demographic is approximately 8-10 years younger than its print and experiential audiences

At the inception of this initiative, the website (essence.com) had not yet been optimized to support these objectives

SOLUTIONS

We settled on an 8-column grid and three different row structures:

• Full-Width for Video and landscape photos

• Half-Width photo or copy centered with negative space on left and right rails

• Two Equal-Width photos with no negative space

We established the following content zones, to simplify the number of design permutations that would have to be built for the content management interface:

• Video

• Headline, Dek and Credits

• Magazine Cover

• Centered Copy

• Centered Quote

• 2 Half-Width Quotes

• Full-Width Photo with Credits

• 2 Half-Width Photos with Credits

• Centered Photo with Credits

• Footer Credits

We proposed the following interactions

• Reveal on scroll for full-width photos

• Left or Right Slide on scroll for half-width photos

• Dynamic Headline Copy

RESULTS

• The digital cover story experience, debuted in Feb 2019 to 750,000,000 media impressions, improving 2018’s record for an Essence cover by 100%.

• After 2 months of manually developing these stories, ESSENCE.com was optimized to automate this process.

• April 2019 was used to showcase Apple News + at their Keynote and streamed to approx. 20,000,000