Ivy Park by Beyoncé
Nordstrom held the exclusive US launch. Six weeks from moodboard to live, and most of the product gone within days.TL;DR Built→ Scrolling brand experience, launch emails, social, in-store signageScope→ Creative direction, experience design, copywritingStack→ Nordstrom CMS, custom components, HTML/CSS/JSAngle→ Nordstrom held the only US partnership, so the website was the entire launch. One polygon, six weeks, no margin.
Field Creative Direction Campaign Design Experience Design
Author Jeremy Prasatik Published: 2016 Status: Complete
Classification Creative Direction Campaign Design Experience Design Copywriting
Abstract
Beyoncé's first activewear line, with Nordstrom holding the exclusive US retail partnership. That meant the digital experience had to carry the full weight of the launch - no other retailer had product, no other site told the story, and the website became the storefront, lookbook, and campaign rolled into one URL.
Four weeks to moodboards, wireframes, and a concept pitch, then two weeks to build and ship. The brief arrived under NDA before the team had cleared their schedules. Daily calls with Ivy Park while direction locked. Photography supplied: black-and-white athlete portraits and color product against blue and gray backgrounds, with everything else - typography, layout, copy, animation, interaction - left open. That kind of latitude on a project this visible doesn't happen often.
The polygon emerged during concepting as a way to break the rectangular grid the photography sat in. Angled, rotated, animated on scroll, it carried from hero banner through product carousels into email headers. Custom CMS components built for the project entered Nordstrom's shared library and powered other launches for two years. 95% of products sold out within days.
An NDA Before the Brief Landed.
Sign first, find out after. What the signature bought: Beyoncé's name on the project, and a schedule with no slack in it.Nobody in activewear had tried the position Ivy Park was staking out, luxury fashion on one side, athletic performance on the other. No precedent to reference, no competitor to copy. The design had to land in that gap without leaning toward either side.
Week one: references, moodboards, competitive audit. Weeks two through four: wireframes, design concepts, copywriting, motion studies, all of it presented to Beyoncé's creative team, revisions turned around overnight. Weeks five and six: build and ship.
The portraits came editorial in tone, with range across body types and ethnicities. Everything around them was open territory.
So the type went larger than expected, motion lived in every scroll position, and the photography kept room to breathe.
One scrolling brand experience. Launch emails timed to the drop. Digital marketing across Nordstrom's owned channels, social cut for each platform, in-store signage for the locations carrying the line.
Six deliverable categories built from the same handful of elements.
The Timeline
Week one: references, moodboards, competitive audit. Weeks two through four: wireframes, design concepts, copywriting, motion studies, all of it presented to Beyoncé's creative team, revisions turned around overnight. Weeks five and six: build and ship.
The Freedom
The portraits came editorial in tone, with range across body types and ethnicities. Everything around them was open territory.
So the type went larger than expected, motion lived in every scroll position, and the photography kept room to breathe.
The Scope
One scrolling brand experience. Launch emails timed to the drop. Digital marketing across Nordstrom's owned channels, social cut for each platform, in-store signage for the locations carrying the line.
Six deliverable categories built from the same handful of elements.
The Polygon Held the Page Together.
Every photo came in a rectangle. One angled shape started cutting portraits out of the grid, then took over the page.Started as a crop mask for portraits. Angled edges against straight photography gave the athlete imagery the exact tension the positioning called for. One geometric idea handling framing, motion, and signature.
A hexagonal frame, sometimes cropping a portrait tight to the jawline, sometimes opening wide enough to hold a full figure.
On scroll it rotated slowly, giving flat photography a sense of depth. A single CSS transform doing real design work.
"Confidence is Strength." The voice got written during production, line by line, while the pages took shape. Short declarative lines, present tense, speaking straight to the reader when it spoke to anyone at all.
The experience required components that didn't exist in Nordstrom's CMS - parallax modules, animated polygon masks, full-bleed video with scroll-triggered playback, type lockups with responsive scaling.
Built them. The Ivy Park project paid for itself in reusable infrastructure.
The Polygon
A hexagonal frame, sometimes cropping a portrait tight to the jawline, sometimes opening wide enough to hold a full figure.
On scroll it rotated slowly, giving flat photography a sense of depth. A single CSS transform doing real design work.
Typography at Volume
"Confidence is Strength." The voice got written during production, line by line, while the pages took shape. Short declarative lines, present tense, speaking straight to the reader when it spoke to anyone at all.
CMS Legacy
The experience required components that didn't exist in Nordstrom's CMS - parallax modules, animated polygon masks, full-bleed video with scroll-triggered playback, type lockups with responsive scaling.
Built them. The Ivy Park project paid for itself in reusable infrastructure.
For everybody
and every body
Built Without a Brand Guide
No palette. No type system. No rules at all. The photography and the name arrived, the rest got invented.Six weeks to build the visual language while the page itself came together. The polygon, the type set at volume, the scroll that ran from grayscale into color. One system carrying a launch that lived on a single URL.
The System
No master file ever existed. The palette, the type, the shape, all of it got set during production and stayed consistent because the group building it was small and stayed the same.
What follows is the working kit. The letterform behind the logo, the colors as they ran, the type at full volume, and the one shape the identity leaned on.
Colour / as used
HEX #18A6CC
HEX #8E9499
HEX #0E0E0E
Type / at volume
The polygon / signature
One System, Every Format.
The page set the rules. Everything downstream inherited them.Once the page locked, the rest was format adaptation. Polygon, type, photography already established - email templates, banner ads, and social formats became execution rather than invention. The visuals scaled because the elements were simple: a polygon crops the same at 300px and 3000px, bold type reads at any size, black-and-white photography converts to any aspect ratio.
Sold Out in Days
Live in six weeks. 95% of the product gone in less.Services
Creative Direction
Campaign Design
Experience Design
Copywriting
Stack
Nordstrom CMS
Custom Components
HTML/CSS/JS
Links
The creative direction, typography, layout, motion, copy, and rollout happened in a Nordstrom office with a small team and a hard deadline. The brief was open enough to allow real decisions and tight enough on time to require them.
The polygon, the type at scale, the progression from black-and-white into color - none of it came from a brand guide. There wasn't one.
After launch, Beyoncé sent the team a personal thank-you video. That part stays off social.
