June is a modern appliance company dedicated to bringing intelligence to the tools you use most in the kitchen.
Joining June soon after they founded presented the opportunity to work on all aspects of visual design including, branding, packaging, user interface, and marketing.
The name June was chosen for the company because it evokes good feelings, nostalgia, and warmth. The wordmark needed to reflect these ideas while also being highly legible, and scale to work on anything from hardware, to print, and digital applications.
My role was to explore all possible options for a wordmark that could convey the newness and potential of the product, while also being approachable and trustworthy.
Through refinement, I landed on a lowercase san-serif treatment with attention paid to the symmetry of the ‘u’ and ‘n’, as well as the curve of the ‘j’ that mirrors the curve on the exterior of the oven. The dot above the ‘j’ adds just enough whimsy.
“This is one smart product that lives up to its promise, and we’d be excited to have it in our kitchen.”
The high level challenge when creating the website was to present the product in a way that balances its technical nature with its intended benefit...an improved lifestyle. Rather then present the oven floating in space followed by a long list of specifications, we chose to highlight the human aspect and show it in context, surrounded by a rich color palette.
One of the features we take pride in is the ability to see real-time cooking status, showing temperature, mode, and time remaining. This plus a live video view of the interior gives good insight into how your meal is progressing. When combined with the June’s food thermometer based cook modes this makes it unnecessary to anxiously hover in the kitchen.
Early concept sketches
Another amazing component of the June ecosystem is the collection of recipes created by our culinary team exclusively for the June oven. While the internet, and long list of available recipe apps certainly present a lot of options, the experience often feels like a copy and paste from cookbooks, and doesn’t address what it’s like to be active in the kitchen.
We aimed to solve that by providing appropriate UX based on context. Browsing, filtering, and saving recipes is one experience. Following a recipe while performing tasks and maybe having messy hands in another.
We made it easy to follow a recipe by showing only the necessary ingredients and quantities to complete that step, without having to constantly cross reference from another view. A looping video is easy to understand and avoids the need to memorize multiple tasks.
