Benchmade Bugout

The Summary

Benchmade is renowned for making some of the best knives on the market. Their Bugout knife, is a beautiful, sharp, well-designed every day pocket knife, but we felt its presentation on the Benchmade website was lacking.

To remedy this, we created a website featuring custom photography, dedicated specially to the Bugout knife, and used the features of the knife as design inspiration to create a unique shopping experience.

Services Rendered: Web Design, Web Development, Photography

The Brief

Title: Benchmade Bugout

Objective: Create a landing page to promote Benchmade’s Bugout everyday pocket knife. Make the design elements of the site compliment the features of the knife. Show off at least one benefit of the knife.

Audience: Outdoorsmen, EDC enthusiasts, modernists, minimalists

Stylistic Requirements: Masculine vibe. Maintain Benchmade’s branding where possible. Incorporate micro-interactions to bring life to the site.

Technical Requirements: Create the site in Webflow using Client-First framework. Use photos shot by myself and edited in Adobe Lightrooom CC.

The Process

Keeping to Benchmade’s branding, I inspected Benchmade’s site code for the typeface used in their branding, and found it to be Gotham. I also used a color picker tool to pull the blue brand color from the buttons on their website. I kept font weights similar to those on Benchmade’s official site, with a few stylistic exceptions.

I used mostly squared edges in page elements to both compliment the sharpness of the blade, and stick with Benchmade’s branding – except for the navigation buttons on the product slider, which I kept rounded because I felt it helped to distinguish them visually from other elements and also to compliment the screws in the knife.

Since, unsurprisingly, Benchmade didn’t respond to my request to borrow several roughly $200 knives, I borrowed some plain product photos with blank backgrounds from their existing site (I was sure to give credit on the new site). Taking my own stylized photos was part of my original goal for the project, since I’m offering both web design and photography services. However, not having access to multiple knives to take photos of left me with only one option... Literally. One. Because I own exactly one Benchmade knife, the Bugout, in all black.

Since my options were now limited, I shifted my thinking from using several different knives to focusing the whole site on just the one style and color I had access to. To pull this off, I decided to keep a minimalist, dark aesthetic throughout the site, to compliment the all-black design of the knife, with some pops of grey-white to compliment the shiny edge of the blade.

Throughout the site, I used mostly dark neutral colors, sampled from the images I took of the knives. Sure, I could have just used black #000000 and white #ffffff, but what fun would that be? I like how using colors sampled from the images creates consistency throughout each element and ties them all together.

The white you see in the background of the one image is actually caused by me holding the knife directly in front of a studio light, and coincidentally turned out to be nearly the same as the grey-white Benchmade used in their product photos, so I used the same white from my photo for the product photos on the new site. This photo also lets the user visualize the product in-hand (literally) before they’re presented with the selection of product styles to choose from.

I made sure to get a photo of clipping the knife into my pocket, as this is one of the less obvious benefits of this knife, aside from it being sharp, and albeit a big selling point for the EDC audience we’re targeting (per the brief), it’s one that’s too boring to simply write about. While I didn’t plan for this going into it, I also ended up really liking the color contrast between my hands and the branded blue elements in all of the photos.

The text about laser-cut steel was something Benchmade had on their website. I thought, since it was important enough for them to include, I should include it too. But it felt too bland. I felt the numbers they cited carried a lot of weight in the sentence, so to emphasize that, I accented them with the brand’s colors, giving a little pop of color to the page. I also like how using the same color connects them to the Buy Now button, insisting you purchase your own one-in-a-million (or in this case, 1 in 1.07 million) knife.

Finally, I ended with a video pulled from Benchmade’s YouTube channel. I chose this video because I want to target customers in the outdoor industry, and I live in an area that’s big for skiing – Salt Lake City, Utah, with 15 ski resorts nearby. I like how it also ties in visually with the page, being mostly neutral colors, with orange highlights and bluish shadows which are similar to the accent colors of the site.

I hope you enjoyed this breakdown of my process, and if you made it this far, thanks for reading! This project was fun a fun spec piece and I’m proud to add it to the Boggs portfolio.

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