Product marketing website
Work with the founders & a UX writer to design the tone, voice & content for the website pages.

Create a visual brand identity
extending from the current logo, since there were hitherto no brand guidelines.

The colors had to be extended from the existing logo and there was no scope for an entire logo redesign. I quickly realized that the 4 colored logo as is, will be hard to extrapolate into a set that reflects the qualities that the POs wanted - fun, light, & easy - or one that looks good together on screens. I did a small refresh to create brighter colors, without impacting the logo too much.

I extended a purple for CTAs,and used yellows for highlights as an accent color - this light color worked well with the inky illustration style.

The illustration & graphic style had to be something that can be easily & quickly recreated by in-house talent - I found the inky style of Pablo Stanley’s Open Doodles reflected a sense of ease and effortlessness that we all wanted for the website.

I made these illustrations for the website and created these guidelines for when we have in-house bandwidth to extend an illustration bank- but also that non-designers in the team can use the completely open source Open Doodles when they need to quickly create something.

We did not have enough material to create visuals around the final product feature screens which were WIP - although this would have been best. Hence the supporting graphics were illustrative at best - I decided to craft the visuals selecting photographs with solid colored backgrounds that would re-inforce brand colors and tie it with the sketchy inky style of the illustrations.

We did not have enough material to create visuals around the final product feature screens which were WIP - although this would have been best. Hence the supporting graphics were illustrative at best - I decided to craft the visuals selecting photographs with solid colored backgrounds that would re-inforce brand colors and tie it with the sketchy inky style of the illustrations.

A major chunk of bandwidth was dedicated to working with the UX writer in creating content sections and unfolding the narrative in a comprehensible way which was a major challenge in itself given we did not have any product screens to work with.

We decided on the following wires as the content took final shape - and I started creating assets to flow into this layout.

As we were nearing deadlines, the pricing and team pages were done with content from the product owners in quick turn-around times as there was little scope for iterations or explorations.

Much later I was asked to pick up a redesign of the blog we had to tie it with the style of our website. A fair amount of time was spent on designing a blog from scratch thinking along the lines of a ‘content’ hub that would accomodate all manners of media types - from videos to podcasts. This never took flight because of the intense development bandwidth it would consume and how it wouldn’t be worth the returns.

However, we still needed a ‘quick’ fixing of our blog. Our engineers decided on the best route being - the using a template with the ghost cms? and changing the styles to fit our website theme.

I scoured for purchasable templates with some ideas of how we can make it work with our website. We finally purchased “Korima”. At the time I was also figuring out how design translates into development, and how I could as a designer do a better job of handovers to avoid discrepencies between the two. I asked if I could take up the css styling of this myself - in the process learning a lot about root styles, media queries, font and svg styling, grid layouts and more.

From the very start, I wasn’t given the brief with a blank canvas & endless resources - and I realized that will never be the case. I had to work with a legacy logo, difficult deadlines, limited development bandwidth, unavailable assets, and indefinite clauses that had a heavy influence on many decisions that were made above.

FThis project was gruelling for me in a few areas - the major one being at the time - my limited knowledge of UI development. I had to work with a developer who insisted on removing whatever trills and frills he deemed was unimportant in my design - and so what got built in the end lacked the polish that I put into the alignments and sizes and nuances of typography. Since then I have learnt a great deal about the nuances of ensuring proper handovers.