Creative Direction, Product & Identity Design
“Unbalance in order to rebalance…”
Sequoia-backed Topcoder (recently acquired by Appirio) is a design and development, crowdsourcing platform with a million plus members globally, working on projects for companies such as IBM, U.S. Dept. of Energy, Deloitte, and eBay.
(Appirio / Topcoder was ultimately acquired by Wipro.)
Problem, limitations, solution
Lack of platform cohesion both in terms of user experience and brand identity. Multiple audience segments (developers, designers, data scientists, etc.), internal voices, and related concerns among clients/partners.
Newly formed, untested product, design, and dev teams, generally high expectations (investors, board, management), extremely short runway.
Push the limits of what the platform could be by creating a conceptual narrative around the desire for major change. Root this in an executable design approach that would deliver timely results whilst allowing for the integration of community feedback.
Product design concepts
(Background images by Peter Saville.)
Iconography
A stylistic template for recurring and evolving icons.
Final direction
The process allowed for multiple iterations and presentation
Member profile.
Navigation device, section architecture.
Personal metrics view.
Member dashboard.
