OOKA is an outstanding brand that produces hookahs and pods full of style and expressiveness. The brand and associated marketing strategy that the Ooka team communicated to me was very clear and precise right from the start: to communicate not so much the product but the associated lifestyle, targeting a specific audience: creative people for passion, work or ambition. So designers, artists, musicians, writers, in other words, all the new creative professions of the contemporary economy. Why? Because Ooka proposes itself as a tool to escape from everyday life and seeks inspiration in moments of escape at hand. From a visual point of view, the references were already set by the design of the device, minimal, modern and abstract, which is however accompanied by the more colourful and expressive pods associated with the type of experience that can be had. Along with this, however, the visual tone had to be brought back to a more native dimension of the instrument, that of the Middle East from which the hookah tradition originates.

Starting with the design of the device, the Ooka team was very precise in providing me as the main visual reference an Apple-like style, clean, minimal and modern, but at the same time engaging and visually pleasing during the user experience of navigation. A very important role was played by the brand's font, the Brandon Grotesque, which I used alternating light and bold weights, also in very large sizes for the main titles. I was also able to exploit a series of 3D renderings of the device and the pods, placing them in the centre of the composition and making them play with the associated words. I thus tried to tie in the rounded shapes of the device with the section dividers, and used its details to provide product focuses along the page scroll. The colour palette takes up the black and white of the device, adding as an accent colour the gold colour of the details, to which I assigned the function of bringing the design back to a more indigenous Middle Eastern dimension.

The design was conceived to contain a series of animated elements, such as text, which give dynamism and expressiveness to the content. I had the good fortune to work with a team of creatives who spoke the same language as me from the start, so communication and the feedback loop were very easy and fun. The final design is therefore the result of an effective collaboration between the Ooka team who artistically directed the work, and myself on my side who brought the visual elements to life in a digital dimension. More than just an e-commerce, Ooka's website is meant to communicate the product and the associated lifestyle, and only later to make the purchase.