— PROJECT NAME
Pachyderm
— ROLE
Web Design
Graphic Design
Branding
— DATE
Oct 2022 – Jan 2023
Pachyderm is a high tech startup that offers customers the ability to to import their data and transform it with an automated pipeline. Unlike other services, Pachyderm is data agnostic and works with any type of data (structured or unstructured).
I was hired as a consultant to reimagine and redesign their website in order to more effectively showcase their products and services.
Starting with Vanilla
Displayed on the right side is the previous version of the Pachyderm website.
Pachyderm was struggling to find its identity. The message for the product was recently updated to align more directly with the product. However, the design when I joined the project was simply vanilla, a bootstrap theme with minimal customizations.
In order to create a more exciting brand, I needed to figure out what Pachyderm stood for. I scoured the website and worked closely with their talented CMO (Mark Herring) to shake out the fundamental traits of the brand. We decided on a small list that combined the company name, logo and mascot with our place as a high tech startup.
1. Big, Bold, and Beautiful (like a Pachyderm)
2. High Tech (Tech Company)
3. Professional (Enterprise Clients)
4. Sophisticated (Breakthrough tech)
Given our list it was very clear that our current website to do a much better job delivering on that image.
REBRANDING
The new design uses generous amounts of negative space, bold colors, large typographical styles, and beautiful graphics. Each page was designed to feel bold and exciting in order to create higher engagement and a better user experience for our visitors.
Unlike the original website, sections of the new pages were designed to flow, drawing the user down the page in an exciting way and making the content feel continuous instead of unrelated.
DIGESTING DATA
Most software products and services are quite complicated if you try to visualize exactly what takes place using a diagram or flowchart. Pachyderm was struggling to explain on a high level to prospective customers exactly what product does in a visual way (in this case a diagram).
The original diagram (although accurate) was quite confusing and made if extremely difficult for new customers to understand what Pachyderm does on a high level. It turns out many of the customers failed to grasp what Pachyderm did because of the information overload contained in the original diagram.
As a designer and UX professional, my job is to understand not only what information needs to be conveyed but how to do it effectively while providing an amazing user experience. My solution was to take the most important parts of this diagram and visually represent making it much easier for a user to digest. I used graphical icons to represent the data types and sample code to represent the computing and custom scripts customers could use to transform their data. The end result is an simple and clean diagram that has an easy 1-2-3 representation of the data transformation process. Below the diagram we clearly spell out the features and reinforce what the product is cable of doing.
Diagrams Before & After (use slider to see more)
Diagram V1
The simplified at a glance version of the Pachyderm diagram used to illustrate how the product works. We decided to use this version as it seemed to resonate with customers and employees.
Diagram V2
A more complex version of the same diagram that ultimately suffered the same issues at the original diagram, information overload. We ended up not using this version.
The new homepage for Pachyderm combined a number of unique design elements that resulted in a big bold, sophisticated, high tech brand.