Belief
By holistically redesigning Cadillac's digital interfaces based on our interpretation of modern American luxury, we are laying down the foundation needed for a truly agnostic, digital-first American luxury auto brand design platform.
Proof
Artifacts: In-vehicle HMI, mobile app, web MarCom + E-Com landing and product pages
Guidance: Art direction, content design, digital brand expression, product design, UX
What is American luxury?
American luxury brands are not perceived as true luxury brands in the manner of expensive European brands, such as a Rolls, Louis, Patek, et al. To this we counter—the presence of contemporary, modern American luxury surrounds us globally, and is, frankly, much more impactful today than any other culture's ideas and manifestations of luxury. In this digital age, it is the old, European-dominated narrative of luxury that is outdated and irrelevant to the modern consumer.
American luxury is not about paying exorbitant amounts of money for lineage, ornateness, terroir, or bespokeness. American luxury is designed and engineered. It is approachable and functional. It is iPhones, F-22s, and Air Jordans. It is MIT. It is Disneyworld. It is Warhol, Basquiat, Koons. It is HBO. It is the Black Card. It is purified and distilled innovation manifested through digital and physical matter to create experiences the Old World is simply incapable of creating.
American Luxury Visuals
How do we express it?
The modern American luxury experience is, ultimately, expressed though the convergence of function and form, neither one before the other. It is minimally maximal—distilling objects and experiences into their purely necessary functional traits, and then refining them until they seamlessly blend the aesthetic with the operational.
For our creative discovery phase, we will start with creating a light representation of how we believe the Cadillac brand can be represented through visual and verbal content. This experimentaion will provide us with a direct source of truth we can expand on later to manifest our creative beliefs through our experiences.
Conceptual MarCom Adcepts
Resulting Principles
The direction we've landed on is one we can extend naturally and contextually through our content, where information itself is part of the design expression. Our interfaces can coalesce artistically and functionally with our marketing through consistent principles that express common themes of beauty, detail, and intrigue. These are, essentially, going to act as our brand design platform OKRs.
• Architectural Precision—Type and image layouts are purposefully arranged. Aesthetic structures are exactingly specific in symmetry and balance.
• Confident Brevity—Language is boldly economical. Clear, efficient, action-oriented statements, through a future forward, product-focused lens.
• Technical Artistry—Visual content emphasizes our design and engineering. Highlight the simple beauty of the forms and functions of our vehicles.
HMI
We begin with the HMI because a brand is ultimately represented by its products, and our dashboards are where our drivers engage most with our brand. This makes them the most important manifestation of Cadillac's design platform, as they are the touchpoint that truly defines our brand's experiences in our drivers' eyes.
These dashboard interfaces strip away visual excess and establish the core interaction paradigms of our interface ecosystem. Layered, yet simple information hierarchies that are contextually anticipatory manifest into visual and experiential designs that driver and/or customer needs dictate.
Driver HMI Mode Examples
App
The technical, function-driven aesthetic of the HMI expands to the companion mobile app as an extension of its capabilities and purpose. A user customizable information architecture progressively reveals tightly categorized and arranged vehicle and user-focused functions.
These mobile interfaces maintain visual and taxonomical consistency with the HMI, extending the HMI-first ecosystem and further reinforcing its flexibility and universality as a design platform.
MarCom
Marketing provides a canvas to digitally express the most impactful promotional directives of the Cadillac brand. Here, we can stretch our design platform through the contextual amplification of its core functional principles combined with our bespoke marketing typography and visual assets.
By leveraging our myriad branded visual content, we give our customers a deeper Cadillac brand story encompassing the product offerings of the brand, but in a manner more befitting of the American luxury principles we've laid out in our previous creative discovery phase.
MarCom Product
Our marketing product content further exemplifies our design platform, allowing us to take our customers through a discovery-based expression. Individual vehicle stories leverage the same darkly intriguing presentation to create an atmospheric connection around specific models and their unique capabilities.
These pages balance detailed technical information with the mystery that defines our brand discovery experience—allowing potential customers to explore vehicle-specific features and innovations through the same layered, contextually anticipatory information architecture established in our core MarCom presence.
eCom
Our commerce platform further extends the contextual flexibility of our design platform, as we fundamentally shift from atmospheric intrigue to absolute clarity. Dark mode and wide typography give way to eliminate friction between customer intent and purchasing action.
This commerce ecosystem maintains our core design principles while being optimized for more typical online consumer behaviors. By creating this clear demarcation, visitors are also made more aware of the breadth of the Cadillac brand and its ability to adjust to customers and drivers.
eCom Product
Our redesigned commerce product pages enhance the Cadillac brand ecosystem by giving our non-vehicle products a platform for much more compelling, informative stories on the level of non-automotive luxury brand commerce sites.
The highly flexible content architecture ensures that no matter the type of product, its page maintains the direct, informative approach of the brand. Through this elevated product presentation combined with contextual flexibility, Cadillac can finally have a commerce platform befitting of the brand.
©2099
