DanialYousefi.com
Luxury lookout is a real estate focused portfolio website designed to create an enjoyable digital experience for exploring luxury properties around the world.
The concept for luxury lookout came from my frustration with current real estate websites such as realtor.ca. Websites such as realtor.ca feel old and outdated due to being unoptimized, slow, and visually unappealing. It was strange to me that viewing properties has not evolved on the web unlike many other industries. In my eyes, viewing homes and properties should be a pleasurable and luxury experience because users might be viewing various investment options and properties for hours on end.
This is where the objective of LuxuryLookout was born; to create a high end digital experience for viewing properties around the world. I set the goal to design the experience of browsing properties on LuxuryLookout a pleasure for the user. Browsing properties on this website should be fun and exciting thereby allowing users to search properties for hours and hours through a sleek, fast, and modern user experience. In addition, the premium browsing experience should elevate the properties themselves with high quality and optimized content such as full screen photos and videos that can easily be scrolled through.
LuxuryLookout is a passion project to create a better digital experience for viewing properties worldwide. Being the sole creator, my responsibilities for this project are creative director, web designer, web developer, and copywriter.
As the project continues to grow, other team members will be hired for expansion of content throughout the website in areas such as copywriting and content creation.
The main challenge with designing LuxuryLookout was making sure the website's content was the focus of the experience while the design elements helped elevate that content. The website's content refers to website's images, videos, and text. Using modern UI elements such as custom buttons and navigation links, I had to make sure the design aspect of LuxuryLookout was complimentary to the content rather than distracting from the primary purpose of LuxuryLookout; to browse luxury properties.
Another challenge I faced was website performance during development. Having a content filled website can make the website heavy and slow which defeats the objective of creating a pleasurable website for viewing content. Once of my primary objectives with LuxuryLookout was to create a fast and zippy user experience that allows users to use the website at whatever pace they choose.
All UI elements where designed to be clean and minimal with thin and sleek lines and simple shapes. Buttons were designed with a wide width and thin height to add a unique minimal look. Line elements are used throughout the website as space fillers and dividers.
Having a content focused website experience required meticulous attention to how content is filtered. This required attention to filtering system of other real estate websites to figure out the parameters that interest users about properties. The final 3 filters chosen for filtering properties on LuxuryLookout are browsing by "country", "property type" and "price".
LuxuryLookout's branding was made with a combination of Serif and Sans Serif fonts for a blend of classic and modern look. UI elements and text were carefully adjusted to match in stroke thickness for consistency.
Clean and simple colour where chosen as the branding pallet for Luxury lookout to create a clean and fresh look while allowing the website's content to be the hero of the experience.
The Logo is derived from the font "Heldane Display" for it classical looking qualities.
Creating LuxuryLookout was a great experience for me as a designer. The key takeaway for me was putting myself in the shoes of a user of this service and making sure I am designing for them rather than myself. Instinctively, I wanted to fill this website with heavy motion and animations. Upon trying this, I quickly realized that doing this would take away from the primary focus of this website. This allowed me to change the creative direction of LuxuryLookout and go back to the drawing boards to figure out what makes an effective real estate website.