Creating Lasting Impressions with a Bold New Brand Identity

In preparation for the release of their newest product, Inverse challenged the Yeti team to reimagine their brand’s design direction, including a bold new style guide and completely redesigned website.

‍The Challenge

‍Previous to our engagement, Inverse Finance suffered a serious hack that resulted in the loss of nearly $6 million in tokens. After much work on their platforms security, the Inverse team wanted an entirely new look, to help the organization turn over a brand new leaf.

Beyond a fresh start, Inverse hoped to create a defined visual brand that would allow then to differentiate themselves from competitors in a highly saturated DeFi market.

To help establish an immediately recognizable visual identity and provide investors with a sense of confidence in the company's level of professionalism, the Yeti team came on board to help create Inverse’s new brand story. Ideally, this new branding would bleed into all aspects of the organization and products, providing users with a sense of consistency throughout their experiences with the company.

Our challenges in this project included creating a style guide, logo and new website that visually expressed Inverse’s values, goals and mission, including, financial empowerment, revolution, authenticity, and sustainability.

The Solution

To rebrand and build a new website for Inverse, we used the following steps.

‍1. Site Mapping

‍We first laid out each of the sites current screens into a sitemap, which provided us with a clear picture of exactly what a full website redesign would actually entail. 

2. Homepage Wireframes

We created a black and white layout of the homepage in wireframe format. To do so, we utilized information and opinions from the Inverse team and design best practices.

These black and white wireframes allow us to understand exactly where graphical elements and copy are needed.

‍3. Style Tile Refinement

To gain a deep understanding of the values and ideals Inverse hoped to convey through their branding, we set up a series of workshops and exercises that allowed Inverse to explore exactly how they’d like to be presented visually. Through these exercises we drilled down to the 4 adjectives that the Inverse team wanted their branding to convey: Rebelliousness, transparency, responsibility and fun.

With the insights gleaned from these workshops, we began to iterate on the colors, fonts and general style of the Inverse brand, including headings, links and navigation styles. To help Inverse get a feel for our vision,we created mood boards and heatmaps that allowed them see and vote on each of our concepts.

To ensure we stayed true to their vision, and that we remained on time and budget, we continuously held review sessions with Inverse’s key stakeholders, allowing them to review each phase of work throughout the design process.

‍4. Animation Sketch

An important part of Inverse’s new homepage is a hero animation that  describes their products and gives users a sense of what the platform does and how it works. To arrive at the final product, we created several sketches illustrating what it would look like and how it would work, allowing the Inverse team to weigh in on the process throughout.

‍5. High Fidelity Design

To conclude the homepage design we will applied the newly created style guide to the wireframes we created previously, as well as incorporating a high fidelity animation of the sketch we created.

‍6. Handoff to Development

Each of the above tasks helped provide Inverse with a solid foundation for a new fresh identity with which to launch their new products. Each of the assets we’ve created in this process have been built in such a way that they can be easily used by Inverse’s development team. The Yeti team additionally provided guidance into how to best utilize the designs and style guide we’ve created.

Outcome

Inverse has re-launched their platform with their new branding to incredible success! Since the rebrand, the organization has succeeded in securing several new partnerships, and their token value has skyrocketed!

Inverse has been able to apply their new style guide to each of their products, and is additionally using their new branding in all of their marketing content to great success!