Overview
Lazard is a financial company with a long history of stability and prominence. However, over time the company began losing pace with competitors who invested heavily in creating public/customer-facing digital experience. Hot Paper Lantern was engaged to assist in a variety of tasks, one of those tasks was to create a method where their various creative teams would be able to access brand materials and standards to minimize or eliminate brand variance in the products/promos the company activates.
Roles: Experience Lead and Dev Strat
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Creative
Workshop
The engagement kicked off with me facilitating a creative workshop with the client and the HPL design team. These types of workshops are broken into phases and milestones, which follow a fairly strict schedule and seek to accomplish certain objectives.
For this workshop we had a few hours to get from conceptual vision to low-fidelity sketch wires – a fair challenge. We ended up reaching our goal and filling a robust parking lot full of future ideas to be implemented after our aggressive phase one timeline.
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Prototype
From the creative workshop, we began our sprints. By having design and development collaborating concurrently, we were able to produce a tremendous amount of interactivity in a very short amount of time.
From start to finish the process took just shy of 4 weeks to complete the baseline requirements – of the full design system. Again – we were cranking.
Outcome
When finished, the system was able to support product designers and developers responsible for creating brand-consistent interactive experiences for customers. By integrating the guide, brand assets and replicable codebase, we were able to create a single source for any creative needs pertaining to the brand.
The final step was to create a brand voice section, so those focusing more predominantly in written creative would have all guiding creative principles for developing content, messaging and supporting copy.
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Does your team use a design system?
If not, please know – you can save time, minimize waste/redundancy and achieve scale by implementing an easy to access design system. Shoot me an email for how to get started, caleb@freemanhelp.com.