During the early months of 2023, I joined the fintech Basiq. Tasked primarily with building a new website for them, a great part of the role also revolved around driving their brand in a more consistent direction, since they had never had a permanent designer before. A symptom of Basiq having had multiple freelance designers work on the brand prior to my tenure, was that the brand was scattered, with no consistent direction, vision or guideline in place. While setting out to achieve this I understood that brand consistency was the easiest part, however with so much collateral in the market it would take 6-12 months to propagate the new brand across channels. The challenge however, was creating a new brand while simultaneously executing new work across the business. This is where I landed on the design method of choosing for the task - atomic design.

Brand mission statement

‍At Basiq, our vision is Making Finance Easy. Finance is complex and it can be hard for consumers to make informed financial decisions. We see a world where consumers are empowered to make smarter financial decisions and to engage with their finances in new and unique ways.Basiq enables this by providing an Open Finance API platform for businesses to build innovative financial solutions. Our partners include some of the fastest-growing fintechs and banks in the region. As the building blocks of financial services, the platform facilitates the relationship between fintechs and consumers by enabling access to consented financial data and executing payments.

Atomic Design‍

Atomic design essentially is the process of creating the individual components first, creating a toolkit from which to work with for the brand, and this suited my use case perfectly. With requests for new collateral such as animations, landing pages, social media assets coming from all ends of the business, I needed to create a flexible toolkit from which to launch the brand, without needing to create a guideline or example collateral from which to reference first.

Using this process, I distilled the brand into elements that governed all the collateral that I needed to proceed week-in week-out. This was particularly helpful for the UI system of the new website. Having over 60 pages by the time of it's completion, building it with the components already made, meant that needless adjustments on each page weren't necessary and didn't drag out the process.