Art Direction
Photography
Web Design
Copywriting
YCharts is acclaimed in the financial industry for its easy-to-use charting and data software. As their agency of record, we collaborated with the Marketing and Product teams to design and build a new promotional website that could adapt to their evolving marketing needs. Building the brand identity alongside the look of the YCharts suite of products, we created a new visual language that elevates YCharts while remaining friendly, modern, and approachable.
YCharts has been growing at light speed, creating a portfolio of apps and capabilities that support different individuals within the financial industry. The team needed a website that could be flexible for them as they craft new content and messaging. They wanted flexibility to use different types of content to speak directly to different audience members while also maintaining visual interest and creativity.
We began our process by speaking with key stakeholders to understand how the brand has evolved and the company’s future trajectory. Positioning YCharts as a platform that offers a wealth of possibility, we wanted to showcase YCharts as a creative platform.
We leveraged YCharts’ chart colors to widen the color palette, conveying the potential wealth of knowledge that YCharts provides. This color use helped connect the marketing work to the product and add variety to the communication system. Archivo, a wider font, was selected to pair with the condensed Roboto used in YCharts product. The wider font compliments the brand voice as being bold, authentic, and youthful. App icons complemented the new color system, and blurred forms alluded to the potential of what knowledge and data could reveal.
While we explored YCharts visual identity we also helped restructure the information architecture for how the site would be organized based on different audiences and communication needs. We identified “key pages” and designed modules that could be reused and restyled across different pages of the site. The Key Pages helped create recommendations for how modules should work together and which best supports different types of content. Ultimately, the system was extremely flexible in order to provide as much freedom to YCharts’ web team as possible.
Each page could be comprised of fully responsive modules. This enabled the client to have more customization as there were no set-page templates. Additional customizations within the CMS were added at the module-level so there was flexibility for how information could be displayed. All of the modules were built into the CMS to be mixed and matched in different ways. Module guidelines aided the marketing team for creating custom web art that fit each module.
