BlackoutPoetry.
Create, share, and learn blackout poetry online.
Summary
The founders discovered the art of blackout poetry and wanted to create a digital version similar to creating the digital version of chess, crossword, or Wordle. After gaining hundreds of initial users they began to receive feedback requests and started to expand the product into what it is today, a consumer-facing blackout poetry social platform, and a blackout poetry lesson platform for schools.
What they said about our delivery
We have over 10,000 success stories, this is just what one had to say.
“Love this web-app, I use it daily because I’m ridiculously addicted to making and posting blackout poetry.”
Danielle Maddox
Founder, BlackoutPoetry.co
Branding
With the brand heavily associated with “black” and “poetry”, the core focus was to incorporate these into the overall branding. In terms of naming, due to there being little competition in the market, as well as targeting an audience that are not the most technically savvy, we had the opportunity to use the domain name as the official business name, as this is an online brand.
Logo
The logo was a difficult part of the project, as we often view poetry as being traditional, therefore incorporating a classic “Serif” like design. However, with this being a modern brand with old roots, we wanted to ensure the logo was clean, easy to read, but incorporated a touch of elegance as a homage to the traditional nature of poetry. To do this, we used two joining strokes to resemble the letter B, whilst ensuring the icon represented the practice of using a marker to blackout words.
Colour Palette
With the focus all things black, we opted for a neutral colour palette, whilst ensuring that designs were easy to read, meaning dark text on light background, similar to that of a book or website article.
Typography
We initially incorporated a more classic Serif font, however, with the modern take of the brand, and the product being technology, we found a simpler and cleaner Sans-serif font to be more suitable.
Illustrations & Icons
The main purpose of the illustrations were to support in a video used to showcase the lesson platform. Each illustration is a simple line drawn design with a splash of colour to ensure we kept the designs clean, but added an element of excitement. In fact, we were so pleased with the outcome of the illustrations that we extended their use into the website and application itself.
Project 1 - BlackoutPoetry.co
The first project we had was BlackoutPoetry.co. The clients had noticed the popularity of physical blackout poetry, in which you take a physical book or newspaper, select words on a page that make up a nice poem, and then blackout the rest with a marker. However, they realised that no digital version of this existed, and so they wanted to bring this to life. After-all, chess, crosswords, and Wordle all have a strong digital presence, so why can’t another creative practice be enhanced digitally.
Website
The website went through a number of iterations, but the most important factor was encouraging users to create their own digital blackout poem, and convincing them to sign up for free.
Homepage
As the product is a consumer application, it was important to keep things simple and encourage users to use the app where they could see the value first hand. As such, we kept the homepage very simple, portraying what this is and the core benefits of blackout poetry, encouraging users to explore further. Additionally, we kept the appearance as much like a web app as possible, instead of a traditional website/landing page. The aim of this is to make the experience more immersive for the user, encouraging them to explore features more freely.
Web Application
The web app comprised of a core set of features that revolved around creating digital blackout poetry. The aim of the application is to act as a hub for creating, sharing, and learning blackout poetry online.
Today
The first feature provides users with a new text each day, allowing them to create a new blackout poem. This feature was designed to give users a reason to come back everyday and cement the daily habit of blackout poetry.
Maker
The Maker is the foundation of application, and acts as a sandbox mode for users, allowing them to freely create and share blackout poetry. We used this as the lead to showcase what blackout poetry is and how it works, before introducing users to more advanced features.
Learn
The learn section provided two benefits. Firstly, it helped users learn what blackout poetry is, and why it’s beneficial. But secondly, we used it as a way to bring people to the website. We did this by creating two articles that we knew would rank highly on Google, and as of 2023 brings 500+ new visitors per month, all organically.
Gallery
As we iterated on the product users began to ask for more social features. To meet this demand we created personal galleries, allowing users to share their public pages, but also become more invested in the platform as they invest more into their personal gallery.
Explore
In addition the gallery we added an explore page to support the demand for social features. With this came a wave of inspiration and a desire to create meaningful poems.
Project 2 - Lesson Platform
After the initial launch of BlackoutPoetry.co, we noticed a large percentage of users were schools, as teachers were using the platform in their English classes as an activity. To help better serve both teachers and students, the project scope was increased to provide a platform specifically catered to delivering digital blackout poetry lessons.
Video
We opted for a video to help connect with users and showcase the product in full. To put this together we leverage a few assets, including a voice over service, illustrations, and simple frame by frame editing.
Website
Unlike the BlackoutPoetry.co website, the focus here was on demonstrating the full value of the product to teachers, meaning the website needed to act more like a marketing page.
Copywriting
The copy itself focused on the core benefits the teachers received, e.g. saving time and effort, as well as the benefits to students, e.g. a better experience and more engaged. We kept things as simple as possible here, whilst using simple illustrations to visualise each message.
Landing Page
As mentioned above, then landing page was optimised to showcase the products value, with the aim of the visitor taking action by signing up to a free 30-day trial.
Web Application
The application itself was designed to stay on brand with BlackoutPoetry.co, but to have a more immersive experience in which students would remain engaged, and teachers could easily navigate through the process of creating, sharing, and delivering a lesson.
Login
With most schools supported by Google, we used this as the initial sign up method.
Onboarding
To help better understand our audience, and to provide a more personalised experience, we added a 4 step onboarding process to collect user data.
Dashboard - Lessons
The hub of the platform is the lessons dashboard, where teachers can see an overview of their past and future lessons.
Create Lesson - Step 2
From the dashboard teachers can create a new lesson, assign it a name, and then begin to select the text they’d like their students to create poems from. Again, we were able to leverage a lot of the existing features created in the initial project, whilst changing a design aspects along the way.
Create Lesson - Step 3
Finally, teachers were able to set unique lesson preferences, such as enabling likes, or prompting submissions.
Open Lesson
When a lesson was opened in the teachers portal is was important for them to be able to manage the students in that lesson, as well as the content they create.
Join Lesson
Once the lesson was ready to go, a teacher would share the unique lesson URL with students, allowing them to join using their name and school email address.
Lesson Gallery
From there students were able to create blackout poetry and share it to the lesson gallery, encouraging users to engage with one another in an interactive experience.
View Poem
Finally, an immersive view was added to allow teachers and students to view individual poems in full.
Conclusion
We thoroughly enjoyed bringing these two fantastic projects to life. With blackout poetry being such a unique hobby that we hadn’t heard about before, it was fascinating to learn about it and understand how best to convert a physical practice into a digital format. With 1,000s of users on the platform and a consistent flow of organic website traffic in such a small niche, the project has been a great success. Next steps are to optimise the monetisation model of the business, and to expand into a mobile application.