Sooter's Photography - Rebranding & Website Redesign
Sooter’s is a legacy Canadian photo studio brand built on preserving memories across generations. While the emotional value remained strong, the brand itself hadn’t evolved.
The visual identity felt outdated. The messaging lacked clarity. The website didn’t meet modern usability expectations.
I led a team through a self-directed rebrand of Sooter’s — a real legacy Canadian photo brand we chose as our project subject. As team lead, I coordinated the work and kept the direction aligned: redefining the brand positioning, restructuring the site, and shaping a UX-focused experience that bridges nostalgia with modern expectations.
Role: UX Designer & Team Lead
Timeline: 2024 (8 weeks)
Scope: Brand direction, Information Architecture, Visual System, Website Redesign (concept)
The Problem
The issue wasn’t just visual, it was structural.
Services were scattered across the site with no clear hierarchy. Multiple offerings lived under a single page, with no dedicated sections or clear categorization. Users weren’t navigating, they were searching.
For new users especially, it was difficult to understand what Sooter’s actually offered or where to begin.
At the same time, the visual identity felt outdated and the overall experience didn’t align with modern expectations.
The challenge was to bring clarity to both structure and brand, without losing the emotional trust Sooter’s had built over decades.
Approach
This became a re-architecture problem before it became a design problem.
Instead of starting with visuals, I focused on restructuring how services were organized, shifting from internal grouping to user intent. The goal was to create a system that feels obvious to navigate, even for someone visiting for the first time.
Restructuring the Experience
The original experience lacked a clear mental model. Services were grouped loosely, with overlaps and inconsistencies that made navigation feel unpredictable.
The redesign introduced a more intentional structure, grouping services into distinct categories and giving each its own space. Photography, scanning, printing, and custom products were no longer buried within a single layer, but surfaced as clear entry points.
This shift turned the experience from something users had to figure out into something they could immediately understand.
It also directly supported the project goal of making services easy to access and navigate
Information Architecture
The new sitemap simplifies the experience down to its essentials.
Core sections like Services, Upload Photos, and Contact now act as clear entry points, each leading to focused, action-driven pages. Instead of navigating through layers, users move through a guided flow where each step has a purpose.
The result is a structure that reduces cognitive load and makes decision-making faster.
Creative Direction
The brand needed to evolve without losing its core identity.
It was repositioned to feel warm, timeless, and modern, balancing emotional resonance with clarity and trust. The target audience expanded to include travellers, photographers, and small business owners, reflecting a broader range of use cases
At its core, the direction was simple: make the digital experience feel as personal as the memories it helps preserve.
Visual Identity
The visual system balances nostalgia with modern clarity, reflecting Sooter’s roots in both photography and printing.
Lemon Milk is used for headings to create a bold, structured presence, while Inter ensures readability across the interface.
The color palette draws from the brand’s printing foundation, CMYK tones within the identity, supported by soft neutrals in the UI to maintain a calm, approachable feel
The result is a system that feels clear, consistent, and rooted in the brand’s purpose.
Outcome
The result is a redesign concept built on deliberate structural decisions: clearer navigation, services organized around what users actually come for, and a refreshed identity that modernizes Sooter’s without discarding the emotional trust it built over decades.
As a self-directed project, this wasn’t tested with users or implemented, it’s a concept rebrand. The natural next steps would be validating the new structure with real Sooter’s customers and pressure-testing the visual system in a live build.
Reflection
This project reinforced a key idea:
clarity isn’t added at the end—it’s designed from the structure up.
By fixing the foundation first, every visual and interaction decision became more intentional and more effective.
More Projects
