After developing a 55 page guideline, a fully fledged design system, 11 Screens for the web app and the 4 pages of the landing page, I feel nothing but relief and pride, I am proud of my work on this project as I worked a lot for it, doing several tasks like motion graphics and prototyping to ensure that this brand would feel like a real bank, That being said I faced a lot of challenges when designing a brand identity but I also found a lot of things interesting, In this page I will talk about the challenges, interests, and my overall thoughts about this project
The first design part of the project I spent a good amount of time on was designing the identity of the brand itself, I struggled to come up with a good name, I remember just picking random words and trying to fit the pieces of how this is a good bank name, Bear Bank was one of names I came up with and I’m glad I didn’t use it, But through some ideation and talking to some friends we talked about how my values should represent the name and how I had wanted the bank to appeal to a younger audience following the brief, so through some time I came up with the name XP and I knew it had a lot of potential with the gaming aspect in mind so that is why I chose it, but then I had to pick the design…
When developing any of recent projects lately, I have tried my best to go with a style that is not Swiss design as I want to diversify my work and ultimately not get bored, that being said my original idea for the XP design was to be of cyberpunk origins, I was ultimately excited about this as I am a fan of the design, that is until I got some feedback from Daniel stating that the design may be too niche, I took this heavily into consideration and I realised that while yes it is cool, it can be hard to follow, a lot of people won’t get the reference, it can also be hard to implement and a lot of the time users just want to check their money or send it and that is it, so with this all in mind I toned it back to a more brutalist design which helped the identity of the brand.
Components were a nightmare sometimes, This was the first time I had ever designed any, so I had to learn as I worked, But the layout of text impacts the component, scaling could be annoying, and even the component itself wouldn’t be apart of the frame when inserted which really tested my patience, But through this I’ve learned to plan components a lot better and to consider them when designing for multiple screens.
Prototyping in Figma proved challenging at times as I’m still relatively new to that side of Figma I struggled to use simple features like drag the box to show a different box, I had to create two screens and then smart animate it, and then I had to keep adding stuff to each screen and I always kept thinking surely there was a better way to do this, I didn’t know particularly what to search for when I was having an issue with Figma, I suppose a way to get better at Figma would be to watch some tutorial videos on YouTube provided by Figma and Users during the summer, so that way I’m aware of how it works and I can then create some solid work.
I was heavily interested in the Design System that Wise had created, My only wish was that I had discovered it earlier instead of creating a PDF of the Guidelines themselves. But I did do both so it is a minor grievance, What interests me about it, is the future of design systems, we had a guest speaker come in to talk about guidelines and he showed a lot of online guidelines for brands like Paramount, This further helped me to be inspired to create one for XP itself, as I just wanted to see if I could do it. And I feel like I’ve achieved that.
To be honest the feedback I got throughout this project was great, from peers, classmates, friends and even my family, I remember posting some stuff on my close friends story on Instagram to sort of vent about the project, and I shared a ride with one of my best friends, who isn’t in the design world and he said that it looked real and something that he would use, he was interested in the project, which to me helped me push the brand identity further, I tried experimenting with different tones of voice, adverts etc. just to garner views and opinions on what worked and what didn’t, I did get my fair share of negative feedback which of course I took into consideration always, I actually had one person in the class who will be unnamed, come up to me asking if they could be honest with me and of course I said yes and they said and I quote “See your XP brand. It is “Shit”. To which I replied “why” to which they said “It isn’t reflective of you, it doesn’t express yourself”. And this is when I realised what this project or any university project I’ve done is about, It is almost like getting a brief from a client and you the designer has to match that brief, we were to create a brand identity that would appeal to a younger audience, and I feel I’ve done that. Now of course there was more to the brief but that was one of the main requirements to be followed, Of course I followed suit and did everything it asked whilst keeping up on the brief constantly.
While not necessary, I was happy to do this part of the site wherever I could, so much so I made a page dedicated to developing it, I’d say the one I’m most proud of would be the Blender 3D Cards animation as it was a lot of fun to make, I feel the motion graphics just help give the app and landing page more life when your reading them, which was my intention when designing them. I’m proud of each one and I hope the next project allows me to experiment with them as well.
The purpose of this project was to create guidelines for a bank to appeal to younger people that we would then use to create a prototype following the guidelines we set ourselves. To understand branding as well as implementing the design and tone of said Brand.