Lagom Studio
Promoting community through creativity, shared experience, and skill building 🎨
Background
Lagom Studio is a handcrafted pottery studio located in Hillsdale, Ontario. Lagom translates to “just right,” a Swedish philosophy to living. Lagom Studio embodies this philosophy. By focusing on moderation, balance, connecting with nature, and taking care of your communities, Lagom has been able to set themselves apart.
Project
Lagom Studio was looking to advance their website from their current theme to a fully custom website. They wanted the ability to also sell their products online and use the platform to handle all of their bookings and calendar events.
After our initial strategy sessions, we determined that creating the initial website and then adding ecommerce functionality down the road would be our best course of action. This is that journey.
Stay calm and pottery on
Most websites try to be very flashy, in your face, and stylized (our website is the perfect example of this. It’s catchy.) However, the Lagom brand is something different entirely. To go to Lagom is to relax, have fun, and learn. It’s about calmness, and simplicity. To achieve this, we focused on finding the perfect colours.
Colours

Calming blues and greens
Lagom Studio wanted a very minimalistic website, nothing fancy, just clean design that is easy to navigate. Lots of white space and straight lines were used to guide the viewer’s gaze from one piece of important content to the next. The biggest challenge here was to get the perfect colour palette. The Lagom Studio blue is absolutely gorgeous. It’s playful, and calming all at the same time. We needed colours that would compliment this well.
Ultimately, we used a technique called “hue shifting” to get our base of colours. It’s the process of shifting through colours in a way so that each darker colour creates the illusion that it is just a darker shade of the previous, brighter colour. Extreme examples of this are when you colour shift from yellow to green to blue, and it all looks natural!
Notes
Higher engagement rates…
Websites have a higher engagement rate when elements of the navigation appear along the top of the page. If you put everything into a hamburger menu, a user’s first instinct is to scroll down, aimlessly.
Knowing this, we decided to create a hybrid approach. When a user scrolls down, we animate in the most important navigation links along the top of the page. This tells the user “keep exploring down the page, but when you’re ready, here is where you can go next.” By not showing these links right away, we allow for a distraction free view of the initial page. One that breathes.
Less light reaches the walls of a cave the deeper you go
We wanted to emulate this. By using Venice Blue for the footer, we have created a clearly distinct end point on the page. Adding a footer creates a good user experience. However, a great user experience is all about guiding the user where you want them to go. In Lagom’s case, showcasing their gallery and viewing their calendar to book an appointment are their two most important links. So…

…we decided to add a split call-to-action, to very clearly illustrate to the user where they should go next. By providing these two links a lot of space, we demonstrate the importance of the links, further guiding the user along their journey.
After a successful launch we began work on phase two, ecommerce.
Our goal
We always start our projects off with a clearly defined goal, and sub goals. For this project, we wanted the product pages to stand out, while also matching with the rest of the website. To do this, we decided to utilize the same split screen effect that we created for the homepage. This allows the images to become front and centre on the page.
User experience
Being able to zoom in and see the finer details is also necessary for Lagom’s product offering. As such, we implemented two primary features. First, a zoom effect when users move their mouse over the product image. Second, a magnifying glass where, on click, users are greeted with an unobstructed view of the product.

Final notes
Lagom Studio was our first web project, and their studio is absolutely fantastic. We recommend you book a date to go and make your own pottery or try one of their various classes. If you leave near Hillsdale, we highly recommend checking them out. Here’s a google link.