The Ask

• Fossil wanted to stand up a blog to help drive search engine traffic to the website.
• They wanted it simplistic; with minimal bells and whistles. Just a basic blog.
• It should look similar to the existing Collector’s Club landing page.
• It would be updated manually by the content team.
• For launch in January 2026
• Since no one really knew anything about blogs, this was my project start to finish:
  • Planning
  • Design
  • Stakeholder Approvals
  • Development Planning & Management
  • Handoff to the Content Team who would take it from there

My Initial Process

• Having developed and designed for WordPress for many years, I knew this meant:
  • A blog hub or homepage
  • Article page
    • No author needed
    • Post date
    • Category
  • Navigation between articles and categories.
    • Stakeholders initially said “no navigation” for MVP, which did not make sense. I successfully argued against this.
  • No comments would be allowed, so no need for a comment section
  • A blog archive (later scrapped in favor of text at the bottom of the hub page)
• Since Fossil’s customers are predominantly on mobile (between 58% – 80% depending), that always means a mobile-first design.
• However, Fossil is also working on a new headless site, which meant that any work done would likely need to be repeated.

Initial FigJam Board

Since my stakeholders are very visual people, I laid out my idea in FigJam to begin. I opted to use text instead of grey boxes to assure understanding of intent. This is a very low-fidelity start, more meant to give the team an idea of where everything would go with some select annotations.

Best viewed the Figjam board

Medium-Fidelity Wireframes

Since they liked the initial layout and the developers saw no issue building it out, we moved on to the next level of fidelity.

I like to design with the max-state in mind, so everything has far more content than the average planned blog post. This assures proper fit and flow, even if translated into languages with more verbose words and phrases.

There wasn’t much of an approval process. Just a Google Chat with the chief stakeholder, who enthusiastically urged me to move forward. 🥳

High-Fidelity Wireframes

From here, we moved on to FPO content, awaiting final versions that would be delivered to the Content Team’s developers.

Ahead of that, I directed the developers to begin building out the basics based on Fossil’s internal design system. As I said multiple times throughout the project, my directions were: “Keep it simple. Be kind to future you. Don’t do anything you’d hate to redo when the replatform hits.”

Live, Finished Product

The Fossil Blog went live on schedule and has been receiving periodic updates.

Blog Metrics

Metrics taken June 8th – July 7th, 2026