Photovogue New

Context

Photovogue is an International curated photography platform for discovering and advancing the work of emerging and underrepresented artists, connecting them with publishing and commission opportunities across 32 markets.

Launched by Vogue Italia in 2011, it saw years of growing success and became the catalyst for a brand that included events such as the Photovogue Festival, an annual event held in Milan, Italy.

This success presented an opportunity for the broader Vogue International brand, elevating its reach and integrating it into Vogue.com's main product offerings.

Annual Photovogue Festival in Milan, Italy

Challenge

This project involved redesigning PhotoVogue.com to integrate seamlessly with the international Vogue.com. Our design team developed a governance model aligned with Vogue International's technical standards, ensuring PhotoVogue.com retained its original identity.
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The main challenge here was in scaling a country-specific project globally while preserving its core mission and values. This required a complete rebuild, as the brand's global product used a different platform and back-end system than the Italy-based product.

Featured Photos of the Day By Month

This initiative united distributed product design, engineering, and editorial teams across Italy, the U.S., the U.K., and India to align their creative vision, technical architecture, and operational workflows under a unified product strategy.

Navigating the Internal
Design Ecosystem

Designing and shipping an entirely new design system within a completely new architectural framework, working with a large number of constraints involving the frontend, CMS, and backend systems.
Maintaining product-market fit while ensuring a seamless transition from the regional product to the product on a global scale
Preserving the artist community identity and curatorial integrity that earned the original platform success
Navigating complex stakeholder alignment across 4 international teams with competing priorities. Balancing business objectives (global expansion, operational efficiency) with mission-critical values (diversity, inclusion, creator empowerment)

Layout Constraints

The existing governance only accommodated editorial layouts and was not designed for a community platform environment. New pages needed to accommodate large quantities of photographs, personal profiles, and templates that could be easily populated with user-submitted data.

Below are examples of layouts from the Vogue editorial layouts and constraints we needed to design within:
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Explorations

I explored different directions that used the existing Vogue templates, alongside proposing new layouts and interactions. The editorial team initially wanted to incorporate additional art media, including video illustration, new media art, and video. Due to the restrictive nature of the existing editorial layouts, I proposed nested navigations for each art category.

Photographers Page
This page needed show a brief overview of each photographer and their photos in a way users could quickly skim through different profiles at a short glance while also being able to quickly filter through different profiles.

Filters Page
This exploration considered all of the artwork together on one page with left-hand side filter nav instead of a longer top-level navigation.

Key Design Decisions
& Final Layouts

Pic of the Day
Every day, a new artist's work is selected by the Vogue editorial team and featured on the website's homepage. This element has been designed to be the main draw, representing the essence of the creative platform and highlighting up-and-coming artists.

Photo Grid
‍Existing editorial templates from Vogue.com were used to create a photo grid displaying photos of contributing designers. This page needed to be strategically designed, as each photo needed to include a list of specific information, though we were limited to only a few text formatting options and text entry fields.

Shadowbox
‍A clean lightbox featuring social media handles and easy navigation between pages. Text was kept minimal and smaller fonts were used to ensure the artwork was the main focus.

Results

Photovogue was integrated into the main navigation in Vogue.com.

Results
‍Today, the platform has grown into a global creative community of over 411,000 contributors and a curation team spanning over 120 experts in the field of visual arts. At the time it was over 180.000 users/photographers

Business Impact

System-level Impact

Design system components were integrated into the principal international vogue library
Editorial workflow patterns became a template for other curatorial products in the Photovogue portfolio

Team & Organizational

This project established a model example for national and international collaboration amongst Condé Nast product teams
The new documentation and component library reduced onboarding time for new designers by 3 week

Additional Projects