Lightspeed has a range of product offerings with competing brand identities, due to a series of acquisitions. A major strategic goal was to forge a unified brand identity.
Vend’s design system Helios was chosen as the flagship Lightspeed design system. I led initiatives to refresh and apply Vend’s illustration design system across multiple products before and after our acquisition.
Following rapid growth, Vend pivoted to a more personal and unique brand voice. I worked with the marketing designer to create a new, inclusive style to bring our illustrations in line with this vision. We redesigned everything from blog illustrations for the corporate website to app components with the brief “Dr. Seuss meets the New Yorker”.
One of the company’s values was to “Delight our Retailers”. To ensure this value could guide our design system, I created the fidelity spectrum. The spectrum aligns an illustration’s form, composition, and colour with its functional goals, to create space for the delight while maintaining clarity and consistency between designers. Here’s more on the medium article I wrote!
Along with the new, whimsical nature of the illustrations, we represented diverse merchants and retail verticals.
Following Vend’s acquisition by Lightspeed, I introduced the fidelity spectrum across all Lightspeed products. Vend was a light and friendly brand focused on ease of use which clashed with Lightspeed’s bold, confident, and assertive brand. This was especially evident in the onboarding workflow for new merchants.
I worked with our brand team to create a new illustration style, based on the fidelity spectrum, to integrate Lightspeed branding more seamlessly into the Vend product. I also worked with a staff engineer to build a system to efficiently replace all Vend illustrations. Through a series of workshops I organised, other designers and I cataloged our illustrations and their use for redesign. It was especially important to get the why of the illustration — so the illustrator could take it in account when refreshing the existing illustration.
