Get the backstory from the team who helped make it happen.
You may have noticed that your SAIΞVE web app is looking a bit differently these days. That “blue-ish” color on the app’s logo? New. Your ability to see SAIΞVE bubbles? Also new. That’s because in this second quarter 2021, we are reimagining the app’s brand and adding exciting new functionality. A casual SAIΞVE website visitor might appreciate the refresh, but design professionals will see the results of a complex project.
Some background
The undertaking was unique in that we set out to tackle two seemingly unrelated challenges: How can we use visual design to change people’s perception of the SAIΞVE brand? And, how do we use visual design to help roll out a major product update? Here, we explain why we revamped SAIΞVE and what went into creating the new look, including the explorations that led to the new logo, the new illustration system, and more.
By 2019, we had a rich app with many trading functions, but because the original information architecture (IA) wasn’t designed to support such a robust product, the user experience had become busy and overwhelming. To remedy this, we redesigned SAIΞVE from the ground up with a simpler IA, a clean design language, and an updated color palette and logo.
Until 2021, we’d been using the 2019 system to build new investment features — especially ones that went beyond trading. We’d launched Sweetpot, Filled trades, Ongoing trades, Estimated profits features… We acknowledged that SAIΞVE had evolved into something much more than a trading bot, so much so that it invited the design of a new public identity. And thus, the brand redesign project was born.
Goals
Now that we could see what SAIΞVE had become in terms of its history and similar products, we knew what its new brand needed to showcase. We learned from research that people perceived SAIΞVE as PECULIUM app’s trading service, but this perception didn’t align with where we were (and where we were headed) as a product. From there, we arrived at two primary goals for the rebrand.
Our first goal was to evolve SAIΞVE’s brand from being seen as a simple way to trade in the world of Digital Assets, to a place to Save, Invest, Manage, Diversify, Set up tailored goals and Get advice for crypto investments. We’ve planned to unveil the rebrand at the same time SAIΞVE’s cross-app with existing PECULIUM services would go live, so it was important to us that we help PECULIUM users welcome their upgrade to SAIΞVE.
Our second goal was to signal SAIΞVE’s unique communication capabilities. We needed to differentiate from other, more strictly “Trading” apps on the market and signal our added value — that SAIΞVE offers much more : Earn on Stablecoins like Tether and hold smartly one’s favorite Digital Assets like Bitcoin, or Ethereum… Thus Manage a diversified portfolio. We even considered moving our logo away from the bolt within the bubble because our competitive analysis showed that many other trading apps used speech bubbles in their logos. You’ll see later why we retained the bubble.
Logo
We began work on the aspect of SAIΞVE that, when changed, would make the biggest impact: our logo. We started with its color, wondering what it would look like if we added a more dramatic gradient or made the logo a solid color. We even looked at different ways to render it. We asked other questions, too, such as: works in black and white? What if the logo were three-dimensional? What if we add a symbol ? What if it displayed no color at all? For every direction we explored, our team hypothesized about what each change would signal and how those signals might meet our goals.
Once we landed on a few options, we worked to consider how these logos, along with the then-current logo, might come to life in marketing materials. Together, we imagined each version in the real world — how they might look in print ads, online banners, outdoor postings, and so on. Seeing a color exploration on a blank page is like interpreting it in a vacuum — it invites a limited sort of evaluation; seeing the explorations in real-world contexts helps us understand what they might mean in conversation with real environments, which are more complicated.
While we each had our own personal favorites from the four new directions, we knew that as designers, it’s part of our job to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and imagine how they might interpret what we make. But our new SAIΞVE logo would reach billions of people, and at that scale, which includes people of vastly different life circumstances from countries around the world, we needed to rely on user experience research.
We engaged our qualitative and quantitative user experience research teams with our hypotheses about what each logo font option might mean to people outside of our company, keeping in mind our goal of establishing SAIΞVE as a stand-alone brand, less associated with the PECULIUM and more related to wealth management industry. After rounds of testing, research validated that what we were calling “Blue” tested positively against the attributes we were trying to communicate.
The new logotype is far bolder, and achieves a certain editorial authority.
It honors the history of the brand — if a company this young can be said to have a history — without being a slave to it.
Bubbles
We’ve imagined SAIΞVE as the most beginner friendly algorithm-driven investment platform. This platform curates some of the best algo investment strategies that user’s can plug and play with their exchanges, and the AI will trade on their behalf.
This is as easy as just connecting your exchange with one of the SAIΞVE Accounts, and after that everything is automated.
Each bubble is representing a universe within the App.
Exploration creates confidence
The shortest distance between two points is not always a straight line. Even though we ended our exploration with a logo that was not that different from where we started, we felt confident that the change we made was the right one not in spite of, but because of all the exploration we did. Sometimes seeing the wrong solution can help identify what’s right.
Takeaways
The work we’ve talked about here is only part of what was required to launch a successful rebrand. Without the support, dedication, and care of many cross-functional partners, both through SAIΞVE and the PECULIUM family of apps, this rebrand would not have rolled out effectively. Even updating the logo everywhere it shows up is, alone, an incredibly complex task requiring a huge amount of coordination.
We hope this peek behind the curtain into our process was helpful. We can’t wait to show you what’s next!
