Role / Creative Director, UI/UX Design, Design Team Mentoring, Digital Know-How, Experience Design Principles, Co-Creation Workshops, Client Liaison
Agency / Mutabor
Red Dot Award 2022 - Corporate Design
Red Dot Award 2022 - Illustration
Art Directors Club Award
Yello is a supplier of renewable electricity, gas, e-mobility, and solar products and services. We were approached by the energy provider to help them reposition themselves within the German market. Yello wanted to transform its image from being solely a provider of energy services to becoming a source of energy inspiration for everyday life. The new corporate design should be fun, lighthearted, and deliver ‘good energy’ for everyone.
Collaborating closely with both the Yello in-house team and the talented designers at Mutabor, we embarked on a year-long journey of co-creation.
In my role as Creative Director, I steered the ‘digital first’ design process, orchestrating the development of a comprehensive brand strategy, a set of Experience Design Principles, a future vision for the product's UX/UI, and the crafting of a fresh, vibrant, rejuvenated brand identity for Yello.
Combining fun with sustainability, the new Yello brand design features an expanded colour palette, a new logo and typeface, a unique illustration style, modern lifestyle imagery, and a new icon set. All this is brought to life with motion and a tone of voice that presents ‘good energy’ in a fun, positive and optimistic way.
To bring our vision and the brand to life, we partnered with the Hamburg illustrator Veronika Kieneke who created a delightful illustration style and a library of everyday scenarios. The illustrations convey a wonderful sense of fun and ‘good energy’, where storytelling is an integral part of each scenario.
New Logo. New Typeface. One Brand.
To create a cohesive and memorable brand identity for Yello, we opted for a new distinct typeface that would serve as the face of the brand. The typeface had to work across all relevant Yello touchpoints, from the smallest logo on a smartwatch to the largest headline on a billboard.
After a lot of testing, prototyping, and careful deliberation, we selected Madera by Monotype, a versatile, efficient, and adaptable geometric sans serif typeface that exudes understated warmth and personality.
Madera works perfectly across both print and digital touchpoints. Its crispness enhances the brand design, while the rounded forms of the typeface's geometry beautifully complement the circular shape of the Yello logo.
To complement the main brand colours of yellow, black, and white, we expanded the palette to include 4 new colours: Azure, Mint, Peach and Bamboo.
Inspired by nature, the new colour palette includes tints and shades, which can be used selectively for illustrations, infographics and interface surfaces.
Azure is used as our interaction colour for buttons and links in digital interfaces and is also used sparingly in our illustrations to denote a digital device.
In order to guide the design process, conception, and creation of the brand identity, I developed the Yello Experience Design principles in collaboration with the Yello brand team. This design framework provides clear guidance and inspiration for all brand touchpoints, products, services & processes. They are for designers and non-designers alike, and are intended to spark creativity, measure effectiveness, and jump-start new ideas for future Yello services.