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VISUAL DESIGNER

Trussle

Trussle is an online mortgage broker which combines smart tech and human expertise to help users through their homeownership journey. The brand was visually and tonally close to Chaos. Internally no one knew what Trussle was supposed to look and sound like — which made our customers uneasy and impacted trust.

Trussle’s brand was created by an agency and then messed about with contractors, freelancers, and short-term design hires. There was no direction or usable brand guidelines and what they had didn’t feel connected to what customers were looking for. This had a knock-on effect on the product, marketing, and communications. The Trussle personality was not getting the respect or love it deserved.

 
Vector 4

The problem

Trussle had been burnt by the agency who rebranded them and the subsequent consistent churn of designers and freelancers. It was inconsistent, undocumented, and messy.

Cheap design is expensive. Customers wouldn’t trust Trussle if the lack of design consideration was glaringly obvious to them. Was the current brand even something our users were after?

With a tiny team and next to no budget I had my work cut out for me. Everything had to be built to scale and built holistically. Most importantly, it had to be laser focused on our users.

The refresh

It began with a look outwards. What were our competitors doing and what was the effect. How did we stack up against everyone else? More importantly, how could we make things better for Trussle and for our users?

I could unload doc after doc after doc here, but the research methodology only has one outcome. The brand – how we look and how we feel.

We knew people, begrudgingly, trusted the big banks but under a microscope, this had nothing to do with their brand design. In fact, the big-name competitors didn’t have the high design consideration our customers wanted. On the other side of the spectrum, our techy competitors we’re missing the mark.

Our brand was designed with users in mind. From research, they wanted something trustworthy, considered, and elegant. Not starchy and formal. Not loud and trying to be ahead of design trends, alienating users.