Facilitating a small-scale branding workshop for a local startup.

My Role

Designer, Facilitator

Timeline

April 2020 - October 2020

Client

Quantum mob

overview

A complete refresh of an existing brand.

The team at Quantum Mob and I had underwent and developed a complete refresh of their brand that would allow us to have more established goals as a relatively new startup. The result: A complete overhaul of the brand that features a new look for the website, new marketing initiatives, and a new tone that resonates with the company's target audiences.

What was the challenge?

At Quantum Mob the main challenge that we faced was how can we develop a consistent brand across various different mediums. Something that would allow us to have more established goals so that it can resonate with not only with current employees, but also prospective clients and employees.

To help with this, I facilitated a branding workshop with our internal stakeholders (CEOs, Marketing Specialists, Sales, etc) so that we could generate ideas on what we want the Quantum Mob brand to be and where it should head.

kickoff engagement

Setting up the foundations.

To start off this internal engagement, I invited our stakeholders to a couple brainstorming sessions. The purpose of these sessions was to bring everyone into the same environment so that when working together, it can enable us to make a cohesive brand experience. Taking some inspiration from design sprints, I wanted to run everyone through a few exercises to help them see the bigger picture when it comes to looking at Quantum Mob from the outside-in and vice versa.

Branding exercises

The first branding exercise I had everyone participate involved ideating different attributes that best represented the company. The purpose of the exercise was to have the participants identify what they thought about Quantum Mob under different categories. For example, "What impact do we have on others?" a lot of responses from that category stated that we were: reliable, able to set up for success, and modernize solutions.

Once everyone had listed their attributes in each category, I had them select their top 3. The key takeaways from this exercise were that many had chosen the keywords "diverse, collaborative, open/transparent, forward thinking, and solution oriented". Keeping those words in mind would later come in handy when developing the visual identity.

identifying customers

Deciding on who we're designing for.

Having the participants identify who our target audience were had helped me solidify the best way we can structure the site to suite their objectives, and how our solutions can help them. We had chosen to focus on prospective clients (M-L business), partnerships, and prospective employees. With the target audiences identified, this would allow me to develop a better UX for the site that would cater to the needs of those users.

information architecture

Going back to the needs of our target audience, I developed the information architecture for the site that would best reflect how they would navigate the site and how the information should be organized.

Design work

Improving the website's look & feel.

Now that we had an idea on who and what we're designing for, the first priority was to start brainstorming on how we can revise the website experience so that it felt more modern and easier to navigate.

The main issues that we uncovered were primarily around alignment consistency and overall accessibility around colour choices and typography.

Design System

The design system I developed is based off of Brad Frost's Atomic Design. I broke the site down into various small components (buttons, input fields, etc) which together would form bigger components such as nav-bars, combination headings, etc. For primary colours, we decided to go with a purplish blue with different hues of white, which gave the brand a more lively, and trusting feeling.

the final result

The finalized website is finally here.

What I learned

When I joined the team at Quantum Mob as a solo designer, I had the chance to really learn and hone my skills as a Product Designer. As this was my first design job, I learned quite a bit about the tech industry and what it was like collaborating with developers and other stakeholders. This project is a cumulation of everything that I learned at that time. I learned about what it takes to manage and facilitate a workshop as well as building out a smaller scale design system.