Copper Books: Design Systems

Crafted and delivered a design overhaul to revamp an early-stage startup’s core brand identity and digital presence across devices.

Copper Books’ website and download the iOS app → to learn more.

Overview: Project, Solution & Objective

As Copper Books closed its pre-seed funding, it was time to level up the brand.

In the first two months as the first design hire, I led the new brand redesign to make a stronger connection with our early access and beta customers. 

The solutions included a brand playbook first and quickly followed up with Web & iOS Design Systems respectively for implementation over the following quarter.

The objective was to refresh across all devices and marketing experiences to better connect with customers and communicate our mission, and product differentiator in the market.

Solution: Fresh brand & flexible design system

The Brand Playbook covers design guidelines for aspects like name, typography, visual design, color palette, accessibility, iconography, photography, and content. Across 20+ design categories like the logo, logomark, app icon, colors, type ramp, selected states, mockups, social sharing, social media, email marketing, app store, and pitch decks.

The next immediate order of business was to establish the design systems (or components library) for Web (using storybook) and for iOS (using UIToolkit).

As we had to iterate quickly, the components created strived for simplicity and flexibility, starting from the smallest atomic pieces onwards to grow from mobile-first to larger screens.

Outcomes: Five stars rating from users

Designing a product brand at Copper became the vehicle to synthesize user needs & business goals to set up a successful foundation for our early members.

By implementing the highlighted guidelines and components library, Copper benefited from the following:

• The organization was able to be more efficient across marketing and development.

• Individual team members increase their workflow by following brand standards. 

• Leadership received largely positive feedback from pitch decks for investors and board members

• Implementation proved to stay consistent given generous first impressions from early adopters using the product in intuitive and recognizable ways.

If you’d like to learn more I wrote a guide about the value of crafting early branding for early startups here.