Combient Foundry

It all started from a product design sprint and quickly led to ongoing collaboration with branding, website, and beyond.

“Skunkworks” as their CEO called it. We had the freedom to rethink the whole setup without legacy limitations or organizational politics and move with great speed. Now, that’s a perfect brief for us. Show, don’t tell.

We have a soft spot for that clean and minimalist type-driven editorial style. Putting emphasis on the content and underlining the essentials. Although with great simplicity, every detail matters. We took some colors along from the previous identity, but reworked everything from brand imagery to typography and layout grids while working on the website and the materials.

Our approach has been organic and fluid. Change what is needed, and design only what we actually use, not giant brand books or design systems. Often, the best outcome comes from working with real materials (rather than fictive mockups alone). We continue to iterate and improve the visual identity forward.

The previous website had become a disorganized mess, overshadowing the key messages. Contentful (CMS) costs blew to the roof, and the database was bloated beyond readable. Our response was to start afresh.

In the span of a single month, we designed a visual look and modular content blocks. This followed the development of a fresh WordPress site and working with the content editors. Sure, we can agree with many downsides of WordPress, but often, it’s the fastest way and also the path of least resistance as it’s familiar to all content editors. We finally added some subtle hot sauce with GSAP animations and scroll events. The website has already gone through a few iterations, with content migration, expanded cases, and various landing pages.

Together, we are building a new collaboration platform connecting startups and corporations. It combines data from tens of thousands of startups and functionalities required from multiple corporate venturing teams. We can’t tell much at this stage, more than it will be groundbreaking.

We work in tandem with their developers on design and front-end development. Most of our design process involving prototypes and user interfaces is undertaken directly in code. We first churn out drafts and high-fidelity prototypes in Figma, but the nitty-gritty gets hammered out in the browser. This allows us to design, test on-screen, integrate micro-actions, and navigate around potential limitations. We think digital product design is not efficient without knowledge of code. Hence, we often juggle both.

For a management consulting firm, presentations are a core part of communication and, thus, visual branding as well. We’ve built a catalog of presentations in Figma and Pitch for print, events, and digital.

We often encourage Clients to drop PowerPoint. Having a single source of truth, maintaining visual consistency, introducing video and interactive elements, gathering analytics, and even embedding presentations to custom URLs with better tools becomes significantly more manageable.

“Client Studio has become a trusted partner for us in renewing our brand and in conceptualizing digital products. Really value their fast turnaround time, results-oriented creative thinking combined with high quality of finished work.”

Lauri Lehtovuori
CEO, Combient Foundry

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