THD Private Brand Fasteners

Data-led rich content illustration for 900+ product pages

This project tackled one of the largest fastener collections on HomeDepot.com, spanning nearly 900 private brand product pages across bolts, screws, and other essential hardware. My role was to create a scalable illustration system that visually reinforced the product attributes customers care about most. These illustrations were not only meant to be used for the initial 900 products, but for any private brand fasteners that can be represented by these attributes. 100% scalability is key in rich content.

To identify those key attributes, we leveraged a custom data science tool built in-house referred to as KPF (Key Product Features). KPF continuously analyzes how customers filter products on-site before purchasing. For each product, it ranks the top twelve most frequently filtered attributes, helping us prioritize which features needed visual support.

Rather than spending weeks or months blindly illustrating hundreds of one-off details, I used KPF insights (along with a scripted spreadsheet I developed) to strategically select around 40-50 high-impact attributes to illustrate that could be reused across the entire product range. These focused on the most frequently surfaced details – primarily fastener type, thread type and dimensional specs. This ensured we supported the most important attributes on the majority of product pages while maximizing efficiency.

For the illustrations, I combined Blender and Illustrator workflows:

• Threaded fasteners are modeled in Blender, exported as OBJ and rendered from a templated scene in Adobe Dimension. (At the time, I modeled in Blender, but for a project like this today, I’d most likely build the assets in Plasticity, which now plays a central role in my workflow.)

• Simpler forms like washers are extruded in Illustrator, exported as OBJs, and rendered in the same templated Dimension scene.

• Rendered illustrations are composed in Illustrator, where dimensional elements are added.

• Web-ready PNG are exported from Illustrator and uploaded to Innervate where I use spreadsheets and scripts to deploy the new data and illustrations to 900+ product pages.