NARS Cosmetics Global E-Learning Design Vision

NARS Cosmetics is one of the world's leading cosmetics and beauty brands. Based in Paris, France, they employ roughly 250,000 stylists globally at their retail locations. I was brought on by one of their education vendors to come up with the course module design vision for their new e-learning initiative. These modules would be used to train stylists on product knowledge and customer care.

Design Commentary:
The NARS brand carried strict guidelines right down to kerning and font size for various uses so from a design standpoint, I was working under a more restricted environment than I was used to. The NARS look is very "high fashion" with sharp blacks, ultra thin all caps fonts, and lots of strong product and model visuals. I needed to capture all of this and come up with a series of course slides that would make discovering the brand fun, engaging, and highly interactive. One key design consideration was navigation. To help with navigation clarity, I kept all learning slides white backdrop, all title slides black, and I built a full screen black overlay menu with chapter blocks that would light up if the learner was in that chapter. These techniques provided visual cues to the learner where they were situated in the module.