Design Diagnosis & Care Plan

Perin—an engineer-led company—pioneers remote monitoring technology with an emphasis on accessibility, equity, and innovation. As brilliant as their wearable and apps are, their Go-To-Market strategy was shaky without a solid brand identity. They also needed to ready the apps for market within an aggressive 6-month timeline. 

As their creative consultant, I prescribed the following plan of action:

1. A Brand Identity Workshop
   Given their aggressive scope, there was no time to lose. Agile workshops have typically allowed my teams the ability to align on big decisions, quickly. 
2. Solidify a Visual Identity
   Assets like value statements and brand personality traits determined in the workshop make it easy to envision a brand’s look & feel from its very core. 
3. Create a Design System
   Design Systems are proven to save Design and Engineering implementation time with reusable components and patterns—a necessity given Perin’s development scope. 
4. Implement
   With a brand and design system in place, Perin’s designer on staff could free up time spent on custom components, and Engineering could move speedily with minimum Design support.

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The workshop

What's entailed in a Brand Identity Workshop? It's not just about stickies and dots—through facilitated, focused decision-making, a brand's identity takes shape through the alignment of the makers of the product and company. 

The team chose to conduct this workshop in-person—a rarity in post-Pandemic life. I facilitated 10 participants over the course of 2 days. 

Simon Sinek’s “Golden Circle”  framework demonstrates how Purpose & Vision—a company's “Why”—is at the center of its rapport with customers. Its Mission—“How”—is prioritized next, before its Values, Personality, and strategic messaging—its “What.”

The main focus of this workshop was to uncover these elements: Perin’s purpose, vision, mission, values, brand personality, customer Jobs-to-be-Done, and brand positioning.*

*Only some workshop results are shown below in order to respect & maintain client confidentiality.

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Visual identity

Emphasizing Perin’s “safe, trusted, community-oriented” brand personality traits that the team had defined in the workshop, I created a mood board. 

Drawing from community murals with a woodblocking style, Perin’s visual elements are grounded in simplicity and texture. Using stable geometric shapes and compositions conveys leadership and trust. To demonstrate innovation and relevancy, imagery is treated using transparency and soft texture for depth.

*Note: The leadership team did not wish to include a logo design into this scope.

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Systems

Once a visual identity has been nailed down, the next [often tricky] step is creating design tokens for their design system, alongside brand guidelines, streamlining brand alignment across their digital products.

The key is starting small and simple. For Perin, I centralized color design tokens, typography scale, and tone of voice guideline documentation in Figma for easy team access and usage. 

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The Prognosis

We demonstrated that not only could Perin’s team build efficiently, but they could also build effectively. They proved that they could save time and money, but also provide real value to their customers.

The polish and scalability of this brand and design system empowered stakeholders and partners in the idea that this company will do big things…and likely make a tidy bit of cash for them as well!

This is why they ultimately increased Perin’s funding from $1.2M to $2M…an increase of $800,000!

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