Leading the brand and strategy for an emerging startup

I was trawling through one of my design Slack communities, when that little dot popped up. You know, the annoying dot you can’t ignore, indicating you have a new post you must read immediately or else. This time it was someone requesting a designer to help get a startup off the ground and prepare for investment. Stars aligned and I began working on the project. An AI powered book recommendation app that didn’t rely on Top 10 lists. As a voracious reader, nothing made me happier.

It was a pretty large endeavor. The team was small and motivated, but the workload was an impending mountain. Per my usual, I set up a plan to begin tackling this mountain and chip away at the goals that would pave the road for marketing and presentations.

Some of the high level things I needed to accomplish were:

• Brand creation

• Visual style/mood/tone

• Strategic roadmap

• Beginning of a design system

• Prototype of primary feature functionality

That’s all a bit much for a study like this, so I’ll focus on the brand and prototype since that was a large chunk of my efforts. I wrote a separate blog post touching on logo design and how we got to where we were, so go read that if you’re interested in how we landed here.

Deciding on a color palette to differentiate from competitors

When I did an audit, I discovered that most of the competitors preferred teal and blue color schemes, with the odd beige/brown thrown in. How do we stand out while keeping it friendly, engaging, and unique.

That’s how we landed on a palette of raspberry, goldenrod, and sage green, with a charcoal accent. It kept the brand feeling fresh and distinct from the competitors. This is also why I made sure the font was a welcoming rounded sans-serif, leading that style into the logomark as well. And once I checked accessibility via WCAG 2.1, we were good to move forward.

Meme of cat wearing sunglasses that reads “No stress. Just vibing.”

Creating a prototype to share with investors, backed by the skeleton of a design system in progress

This was the longest most in-depth part of the project for me. I spent hours setting up the file with global and semantic variables, just in case. I labelled every layer. I had a foundations and components page. Nothing could stop me! But if you read the blog, you’ll know that there was a huge stop. I was nearly 80-90% finished with the prototype when the client wanted to redo the entire brand. You’re correct, it wasn’t always the gorgeous raspberry with rounded sans-serif we have now. In the early days it was a slab serif with lots of gradients, which was quite a popular trend at the time.

No need to panic!!! All my setup (an ounce of prevention and all that) meant that changing the color scheme and logo would take no time at all. And it truly didn’t. It took me a mere hour to get up and running again.

As another aside, my preferred prototyping program is ProtoPie but that many licenses is hard for any company to juggle, let alone a startup. So we made it in Figma, spaghetti strings and all. (If anyone from Figma is reading this, please send help. I can’t eat anymore spaghetti.)

So that’s all they wrote, or is it? Where’s the strategy!?

Oh, you’d like to see the full slide deck? It’s pretty cool honestly. Alongside the robust prototype, the slide deck has a full competitor analysis, KPIs, short and long term goals, and branding guidelines. Here’s a little sneak peek:

If you want to hear more of the story, schedule an interview. 😉