Lasitha Lokuge - Portfolio - Humanizing The Crypto Space

Why a Rebrand: The Problem

In the fast-paced realm of cryptocurrency, it's crucial to keep up with both tech advancements and user experience. Our products, once celebrated for their simplicity and functionality, have started to show signs of age, accumulating inconsistencies, unbalances, and design debts over time, throughout the evolution from the humble MVP beginnings to current state.
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In a landscape where competitors have surged forward, both functionally and visually, establishing a strong brand identity has become more crucial than ever. Our products, while robust in functionality, have lacked the cohesive visual presence that distinguishes our brand in the market.

Recognizing this gap, we embarked on an initiative to revamp our platforms.

As we began exploring, we found a significant disconnection between our company's overall branding strategy, product design and the new design direction of our products. To create a unified brand identity, we realized we must expand our rebranding beyond just the app revamp to a holistic rebrand including our public website, marketing materials and the whole visual presence.

This case study is all about our journey on reimagining and redefining our brand identity in the crypto space as a humanised crypto brand. But please see our whole rebranding exercise in here.

Current Visual Design

During our initial research, our branding and visual design have taken multiple direction overtime. making us lack of clear visual identity.

Colors are Key to a Memorable Brand

With the decision to undertake a rebrand, to align with our new design direction, we started a deep branding exploration to establish a new visual identity. As the first thing people notice, color plays a crucial role in establishing a memorable visual identity. It is not just about making something look pretty or aesthetically pleasing, but rather, it is a powerful tool for building brand identity and communicating with consumers. From increasing brand recognition by up to 80%, to influencing mood and perception, we realised how important it is to pick the right colors first. Coinhako was always blue and it’s in our genes. The selection of the color blue wasn't just a visual choice, it was a strategic decision deeply rooted in our core brand value: trust, but the question was, which blue represents us the better. Based on our target audience, we created a brand new color palate keeping blue as our primary colors.

Main Colors

Color Harmony

However, our brand isn't defined by trust alone. We recognized that our customers also value caring, safety, and simplicity. To create a cohesive and harmonious brand identity that reflects these values alongside trust, we developed a semantic palette. And each color was carefully chosen to evoke specific emotions and associations that align with our brand values.

Logo Makes a First Impression

Logo grabs attention and makes a powerful first impression. It’s the foundation of a brand identity. A great logo is memorable and separates a brand from the rest while fostering brand loyalty, and is expected by the brand audience. The deeper we dug, the more gaps we started to uncover. We felt something was off when seeing our logo on polished design materials. We realized one of the first things we needed to change is, the logo. Product designers on a mission to find a new logo for the company. None of us are logo designers but this exercise was exciting. Took us back to our visual design roots. We came up with multiple logo explorations and some of these logos were nice and interesting.

But wait, a logo holds emotional significance for both users and employees, as well as those involved in building the company. Introducing a completely new logo carries the risk of user confusion, potentially resulting in a loss of trust and identity.

Evolution of Logos

We did a deep dive into logo redesign. Our findings were quite interesting. There are great brands in the world and some are life long, and even longer than that. For almost all these brands, the logos that we saw as kids and the logos that we see now are different, or totally different. Even we see different logos now, the evolution of the logos are incremental from a version to version.

Starbucks

Shell

Pepsi

Apple

Google

Microsoft Windows

AT&T

Mercedes

The 3 Percent Rule by Virgil Abloh

Virgil Abloh, a visionary designer and creative polymath, is renowned for his groundbreaking approach to design that blurs the lines between fashion, art, and culture. At the core of Abloh's design strategy lies a relentless pursuit of innovation and disruption. He challenges conventional boundaries, redefining the zeitgeist with his unique perspective and fearless experimentation. Abloh's signature style is characterized by its bold simplicity, often juxtaposing high fashion with streetwear elements to create a dynamic and eclectic aesthetic.

Designing Branding Material

Our representation in the market

Marketing materials play a vital role in promoting the brand, building relationships with customers, and driving business success. They are instrumental in increasing visibility, building credibility, and fostering engagement, ultimately contributing to the brand's growth and profitability.

Marketing Materials

Now we got the missing piece and jump back into branding explorations. And gradually we ended up creating social media banners, posters, business cards, letterheads and actually most of the branding materials.

Pro and Retail Banners

Institute and Global Expansion Banners

Product Banners

Social Media Banners

Collage Illustrations

Public Website

Our digital reflection

Public website is often the first point of contact between a brand and its audience in the digital world. It's a powerful tool for building credibility, fostering customer relationships, and staying competitive in the digital landscape.

Exploring on Public Web New Design

Now we have a sense of where are we heading. We started exploring the public website again. We took the modular approach and started to create different sections/modules of the website keeping our design direction in mind. This was fast spaced iterative process. After a number of iterations, finally came up with enough modules to cover our main landing pages, both institutes and retails. Now it’s just a matter of fixing all these building boxes or modules to create the pages. We might create one page for each or two versions for A/B testing.

Banner Variations

Content Sections

Testimonials

Growth

Key takeaways

Trust Your Skills

The whole team was product designers but our roots go all the way to visual designing many years ago. Despite not specializing in branding design, we trusted in our skills and successfully executed a comprehensive rebranding. This experience showed us the power of self confidence and the courage to venture beyond our comfort zones, would make you do wonders.

Walk Together and Win Together as a Team

We all got multiple skills and some unique skills too. This whole exercise was about working and collaborating as a team, while utilising each others skills to overcome challenges. Walking together was our super power to make this whole rebranding possible.