2019

Treder Design Brand Identity

I spent my entire career working on products and user interfaces. I built multiple teams, completed hundreds of projects, and launched dozens of products. I never have, however, designed full brand identity.

I always had great respect for designers working on brands. Some of my design heroes – Massimo Vignelli and Michael Bierut designed timeless brand identities.

Finally, I've decided to surrender to my desire and allow myself to work on a dream project – design of my brand.

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Context

Before sketching any ideas, I started to write down my story. I had to find an answer to the crucial questions: "What do I stand for?", "What is important to me in design?", "How can I contribute to teams creating amazing products?".

After over 12 years of creating digital (and sometimes physical!) products, I stood on the verge of the chasm of meaning, wondering how can I create a sign that sums up my whole career as well as my plans for the future.

I started with the highest possible level–the level of values. I consider myself a principled man with solid self-awareness, and yet I struggled with naming my values. I had to take a deep dive into the stories of my past and ambitions for the future. After this exercise, I identified: loyalty, mastery (neverending strive to become better), and self-discipline as my three fundamental values.

Subsequently, I started to think about all the critical moments in my career. What pushed me forward? What empowered me to become better? I consider myself a capable designer (always on the path to becoming better!). However, my career wasn't built entirely on the foundation of my craft. Not at all. I was quickly promoted to leadership, and by being a leader, I made more impact than as a designer. I was able to talk to people when others were silent, form teams from individuals, help people grow, and create a healthy tension that led everyone to great results. I'm a designer, but I exist for the people.

I had to design a sign that represents my simple values and my devotion to people and teams. What an exciting challenge!

Exploration

I started by sketching geometrical signs that, on some level, represented my story. I designed nearly a hundred different signs – some of them where more esoteric, some, very straightforward. I took a lot of inspiration from the modernist era. I strived for similar simplicity and compelling message, as well as the clean aesthetics.

Sketches of Treder Design Logo
Examples of signs created in the exploration phase of the process.

I decided that gold and black are going to be the primary colors that I'm going to use on this project. I love this powerful combination, and I believe it fits my message. Cold metal, with high value and stability, combined with the space created by the lack of light, felt just right.

The finally selected sign represents my values in the form of a sharp, gold rectangle that encompasses two halves of a circle – individuals working together thanks to the creative tension.

The final logo for Treder Design
The final sign. Simplicity of values and leadership creating space for collaboration.

Finally, I started working on typography. At first, intuitively, I started working with the creations of my typography hero – Adrian Frutiger. I tested Avenir, Avenir Next, Frutiger, Universe, but nothing from my favorite typefaces looked right. Slightly disappointed, I cast a wider net. Finally, I found the perfect typeface for the project – modern, but also classically modernist, not anonymous, but not overused and simply beautiful. Neue Plak – a modern reedition of Plak designed by Paul Renner became my typeface of choice.

Four variants of the Treder Design logotype.
Four variants of the Treder Design logotype

Design of the logotype is just the beginning of the whole project. This case study is going to grow in the near future with a more complete brand identity standards and examples.

Results

  • The brand identity inspired the entire Treder Design portfolio website.
  • Defining values helped me better understand myself and my career path.
Designing for yourself is tough.

Lessons Learned

  1. Designing brand identity is much more a task in storytelling than sketching.
  2. It may take hundred of takes to find the right sign for the story, but at the end of the day – it's worth it.
  3. I loved the process.

Tools

  • UXPin (early sketches, interactive exploration)
  • Figma (final visual design of the logo)

More Projects?

Ready for more of stories? Choose the next project below.
2009

Conversion Optimization

In 2009 I was trusted with the optimization of critical elements of the Nokaut.pl product page. Together with the engineering team, we've worked out a series of hypotheses based on factors affecting human attention (contrast, color, movement, pattern...) and we've performed a series of multivariable split tests. The result? 24% increase in the conversion rate.

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2010

Paper Prototyping Redesigned

The story of the notepad that changed my life

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2011

Homepage for 2.5M People

In 2011 I led the process of the redesign of Nokaut.pl Homepage. At that time, Nokaut.pl was attracting 2.5 million users a month and the owner of Nokaut.pl – Grupa Nokaut was preparing their IPO. An intense project!

2011

Mobile App for 3 Platforms

Web products of Grupa Nokaut had been dominant (2.5 million unique visitors per month in 2011), but the company didn't have much success on the mobile market. Our mobile offering, at the time, was limited to a dated mobile version of the core service built for old cell phones. This service was highly popular couple of years earlier, but with the growing popularity of smart phones users expected "richer" experiences.

In 2010 Grupa Nokaut asked me to lead the process of designing and building a mobile app for 3 platforms: iOS, Android and Windows Mobile.

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2011

eCommerce Video Portal

I worked in the Grupa Nokaut R&D Group for over two years. We were tasked with coming up with new product ideas that addressed the most critical strategic problems of the business. One of the projects that we realized in 2011 was Nokaut.tv – an eCommerce Video Portal that quickly attracted over 100,000 viewers. I had the pleasure to lead design and product development process.

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2015

The New Design Editor

In 2015 UXPin was an established design tool serving over two thousand companies. We've just raised our Series A (led by True Ventures and Jeff Veen – former VP of Design at Adobe).

We knew that this is not enough. We knew that we have to do even more to realize our mission and help the design tools industry move forward. Soon, we've started a design process that changed the entire industry.

2018

The Open Source Adventure

Since 2012 I'm operating as a full–time CEO of a growing startup – UXPin (over 50 employees, profitable). Despite that, I've never stopped being a designer, coder, and a product person. To relax and contribute to UXPin and the overall design and engineering community, I tend to take on side projects.

In 2017, after talking to a bunch of friends working on design systems, I decided to devote my weekends to the creation of an open source repository of analyzed design systems.

For two subsequent weekends in January 2018, I designed and coded (React.js and Node.js) the repository. The popularity of this project exceeded my most optimistic expectations.

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