NEX Design Guidelines
Established in 2018, NEX Foundation is a Seattle-based nonprofit startup that aims to connect global Taiwanese talents. This project aimed to create a new design guideline that brings NEX’s value to our users.
My Role
Product designer
Lead visual designer
Team
Design team
Marketing team
Product managers
Developers
Duration
March-May 2022
3 months development
Tools
Figma
Illustrator
Key Deliverables
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User Research
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Design Guideline/ UI Library
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Logo Design
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Stakeholder Management
Challenge
How might we create a visual that resonate to the brand’s value?
Background
After 3 years of effort, NEX now has 80+ employees, four products and more than 4,000 users globally. However, there was no design system to align all of our programs and help the users distinguish NEX from other competitors.
Discover the pain points
1. Inconsistent brand identity that leads to incoherent user experience
2. Low accessibility of visual elements
Experience Principles
We collected the words from NEX’s marketing and branding materials for 80 comments. After ensuring every text aligned with our branding value, we started to re-grouped and finalize the terms into six principles that best represent the NEX foundation.
Competitive Analysis
We conduct a competitive analysis to explore potential identities that will fit our brand value to develop our theme.
Moodboards
We presented our boards to the leadership and teams, and the board Boldness got the most votes because it matches our branding principle the most. After some sketches and brainstorming, our designer team decided to start with four colours inspired by the boards.
Logo Design
The logo and logo family design is a big point of the new brand guideline; hence, I develop variations and make a precise competitive analysis to help our internal team decide which will be the new logo.
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New Logo & Identity
Finally, after a vote of 50+ employees from our internal team, we made a decision on our final logo and logo family.
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Colour
As gradient + glassmorphism plays an essential role in the visual identity, to maintain great visual accessibility, I developed strict design guidelines based on much testing.
Typography
Bilingual usage is also one of the challenges in developing the design guideline. We decide to focus on the Mandarin font type since our target users are Mandarin readers and mainly use English font in the large headline.
Result
We presented the final design to the teams via Google meeting with 30+ people attending. The teams and leadership agreed and confirmed that this could represent our brand. I am now developing the design system and we plan to launch the new design soon.
