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Brand design using the UX process

brand
meets UX

Agency rebranding project where I led the brand design efforts and used UX methods to validate and iterate.

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In a 1,5-year-long rebranding process, I helped a product innovation agency reinvent itself. The goal: to align brand and communication to the agency's actual work. I had the leading role regarding brand design, built out a design system, designed fonts and took part in strategy, wireframing and mock-ups. With this project, I was a finalist at Design Iteration Award and a speaker at brand design conference 2018.

Used skills
  • Brand Design
  • Design System
  • Workshops
  • Brand strategy
  • UX Research
  • Typography
  • Information design
  • UI Design
Interdisciplinary design process
The process was lengthy and intense but we wanted all team members to take part in it. Balancing the line between involvement and day-to-day business, an interdisciplinary core team of 5 continuously worked on the project. At several turning points, the rest joined in for workshops, feedback, decisions or specialist skills.
The process map, which I designed for the Design Iteration Award, shows how the design process spanned all disciplines of the company and is a modified design thinking process. Project phases included brand definition, ideation and concepting, several rounds of user testing to validate the brand concept, a design and copywriting phase, and in the end, development and asset production.
brand filter evaluation
Two approaches were used to test the brand's user experience. As a first approach, me and the team defined brand values in accordance with Marco Spies' work "Branded interactions", which we measured all our output against.
We used this radar chart as a brand filter to evaluate aspects of the brand. If a design didn’t fit the matrix, we tossed it.
Our old icons shown on the left, for example, were too generic to fulfil any of the values. Through an iterative design process, we ended up with the bold and ambitious colorful approach of double lines and a mix-and-match combination logic that you can see on the right.
user research
As a second approach, we ran extensive UX research. We A/B-tested two different branding ideas against each other with our favourite clients, and afterwards we iterated on the concept through muliple rounds of usability testing.
We repeatedly tested and iterated the designs in qualitative usability studies in a user testing event format called Usability Testessen. Before the pandemic, it was a popular low-cost Creative Commons event where you could conduct efficient user tests in a speed-dating manner with free pizza and beer. Now it is held remotely via Zoom.
Brand design

To leverage the agency's other designers and their creativity, I held method-laden workshops to collaborate on the brand design. There are not that many graphic design ideation methods in design thinking, so I invented some myself.

quickies

small, time-boxed design challenges that help you spark your creativity

design studio

I leveraged the iterative principle of copying and stealing from other workshop participants. We worked independently first and then merged the similarities in our results. Then, we critiqued or stole ideas from each other until we found a common ground.

best practice research

for inspiration

Brand guidelines and design handoff

Together with the agency's design team, I built a design system in Sketch early on. We used Abstract for version control in our collaboration and documented technical requirements like content types and responsive behavior. Putting together this information enabled us to hand off the designs with ease. We also compiled guidelines and materials for non-designers to help them work with the new brand assets.

Brand guidelines in the design system

Example of a documented design pattern

Design guidelines for non-designers

achievements

Design Iteration Award 2018

Finalist

brand design conference 2018

Conference talk in London

Like my work? Get in touch!

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