Final year - FMP Lola's life

For my final major project i produced a website called Lola's life.

Lola's life is a unique interactive online space where young girls can discover up to date fashion, beauty and lifestyle features. By distancing itself from the normal editorial print based and online magazines, Lola's life is a fun and exciting way to get young females interested in fashion. By creating a persona and a intimate bedroom space, users get the chance to explore and discover the space by navigating their way around, getting an insight into Lola's lifestyle as they go.

The website is aged for 13 -18 year olds and is essentially a new format to consume fashion information. I wanted to create this online medium as i feel that today many young girls magazines are either patronising or to mature for their years. I wanted to create something that featured catwalk and high fashion influences with high street and affordable equivalents, like many current print and online mags do, but keep the element of youth there and not glam and sex it up to make it all glossy and sophisticated. 

I chose the online bedroom space as i feel that this interesting way is exciting for the consumer and let's them be in control of what they want to view and where they want to  navigate first. The immature style of illustration and colour schemes keeps it youthful and girlie and let's teenagers be teenagers without having to conform to the mass media. 

The idea of creating a persona came to me after researching bloggers and online social networking. I think that with the fast and increasing pace of brands moving online, it is the only way to successfully reach a hard to connect with age group. During research i discovered that bloggers were so popular because of the personal and realistic approach they take on life subjects, including fashion. It is these real people that the audience connect an build a relationship with. That's why i thought by creating the character 'Lola', consumers would feel that they were getting told information by a peer member rather than being 'told' by the mass media. 

The website includes a number of interesting features for young girls to enjoy. Some are more light hearted and fun articles which provide easy reading for the consumer, and other articles such as the interviews, are slightly more in depth and have more reading material to them. I didn't want to content to be too text heavy as i think that it is important the users remain interest and their concentration spam as otherwise within minutes of seeing a big piece of text they will probably being doing something else on the net.