Process Post: Imagined Audience

The imagined audience of my website is one similar to myself, gen z bakers. It is easier to establish relatability with a demographic that I feel tied to and am part of. This whole website premise of ranting and recipes was birthed by my interest and participation in both activities. The combination of stress baking and ranting is something that I have never seen in a website format before, but was inspired by other media platforms like YouTube or TikTok, where the audience and creator relationship is heavily established based on the identity and transparency between a creator and their respective content. Keeping these vlog type styles of content, I thought about how that transparency would be translatable through a blog, while still keeping with a set theme and overarching concept.

When designing the aesthetics of my website I considered my intended audience and how I could appeal to this demographic. Something that I was reminded of from high school was Aaker’s brand personalities: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness. After reviewing websites of cafes, I realized I would need some amount of sophistication, to present a desirable aesthetic, while remaining sincere and personable to my audience. A good balance of relatable, yet still different enough that it is desirable for audience so that they want to engage with my content. With these ideas of sophistication and sincerity in mind, I decided to establish a clear aesthetic through colour, consistent typography and minimalism, while also imbuing elements of my personality, through handmade touches like drawings rather than photographs.