Nordic Sphere

Visual Brand Identity and Website Design for an up-and-coming new firm

Role
UX/UI-designer, Facilitator, Graphic Designer

Content
Brand Identity, Graphic Design, Web design

Year
2023

Tasked with creating a visual brand identity (logo, colors, typography, website, presentation templates) for a new firm, we began with a client brand identity workshop, providing a foundation for subsequent design phases. Benchmarking competitors across multiple industries, given the firm’s unique offerings, informed our website design. I developed multiple logo, color palette, and typography options, receiving peer and client feedback through several iterative rounds. The selected elements informed the website layout, presentation template, and style guide, which also underwent client review and iteration. Throughout the tight schedule, accessibility tools and user testing validated design decisions, driving further iterations. The project delivered a complete visual identity, including logo variations, and a user-friendly, adaptable website. While UX/UI design was familiar territory, this project offered an exciting foray into logo design, demonstrating the transferability of my design skills and enabling me to quickly grasp effective logo design principles, delivering multiple options within the timeframe.

Challenge

We were tasked with creating a visual brand identity for an up-and-coming new firm. This included the design of the colors, typography, logo, presentation templates and website for the brand. The project also included the technical implementation of the website.

Nordic Sphere logo iterations and their evolution along the way
Logo iterations for Nordic Sphere

Process

Empathize and define

We started the process by designing and facilitating a Brand Identity workshop for the client. This served as a great base for the next phases of the design process. After that we benchmarked competitors to find inspiration and understand what should be on the new layout of the website. Due to the client firm’s unique service offering our benchmarking covered firms from multiple different industries.

Ideate and prototype

I created multiple options for the color palette, typography and logo. These were reviewed by peer designers to get the most immediate feedback and iterations were made based on the comments. The palette, typography and logo designs went through three commenting rounds with the client and improved versions were made based on the comments. When the final versions were picked me and my teammate designed the website layout, presentation template and “starter” style guide for the customer. These also went through multiple commenting rounds with the client and improved versions were made based on the comments.

Test and validate

All of this was done on a tight schedule. To ensure the best possible outcomes we tested the designs through out the process multiple times with accessibility tools and users to validate our decisions. Iterations of the designs were made based on the findings and tested again.

Solution

We crafted the visual identity for the client based on the results obtained from the brand workshop. I created multiple variations of the typography, colors and logos. We designed a user-friendly website to showcase services and enhance online visibility. We designed a few layouts that are easily adaptable and can be smoothly cloned or modified for future uses.

Mockup showcasing a new website design made for Nordic Sphere
Mockup of a section from the Nordic Sphere website's services page.

Learnings

UX/UI Design is what I do the most and that side of this project was pretty usual. Getting seriously into logo design on the other hand was an interesting new avenue that this project offered. I learned about how my design skills could be translated into logo design. I quickly understood what worked and what did not when taking the customer’s opinions into consideration with the design decisions. Even though this was my first logo design process I was able to provide multiple great options for the customer in a limited time frame.

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