Coolspotters: Where people and products meet

Last year, Mike D introduced me to a friend of his who had just started work on an exciting new project. Coolspotters, the first major project from Fanzter was built on the back of a simple concept: combine products and people and let the users create the connections.

Social Shopping

Of course, the idea of social shopping isn’t a new one. Just look at Amazon for example. The majority of my purchasing decisions on Amazon are based upon the reviews and recommendations of those products. But, Coolspotters does something new. It places the products in context to their useage with celebrities. For many aspirational brands, it’s this that defines them. Not the product itself, but who it’s being bought by, and who’s using it.

The Coolspotters launch UI. The revision includes a lot of work subsequently done by Fanzter based on our initial design concepts.

More than just another social app

The interesting potential for Coolspotters is that it becomes a repository for those transitory trends of fashion. So, in time, you could look back and see who were the early celebrity adopters of the iPhone, or which car was in vogue for last Autumn. All of this data could be mapped and charted to possibly show some interesting trends in how brands infiltrate and work through this highly-public, and influential, sector of society. That is something I’d love to see exploited.

My involvement

The challenge given to Mark Boulton Design was to craft the user experience and concept (together with branding) which could then be honed further by the talented Fanzter development team. We’ll have more about this shortly in a short case study on the studio site.

Coolspotters launches later today. You can read a little more about it on Techcrunch.

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I'm a graphic designer from near Cardiff in the UK. I've been a designer for over ten years now and primarily work on the web. I'm still partial to a bit of print every now and then though. I used to work for Agency.com in London as an Art Director before working as a Senior Designer for the BBC in sunny Cardiff. This was all before I took leave of my senses and formed my own design consultancy, Mark Boulton Design Ltd.

I've got a thing about grids and typography and occasionally ramble on about them to anyone who will listen.

Mark Boulton Design

If you're after simple, clean and effective web design; let me know.