Exercise 01: Initial Design Prototyping

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When finding my footing during the early stages of this project, the quote “Research is what I’m doing, when I don’t know what I’m doing” (W. V. Braun, 1973) became an alma mater for me. Let’s all be completely honest, very few of us know how to run an eco-company, or a taxi company, and most definitely not a consultancy firm. All within the brief for this project.

So where did I start. Well as the quote suggests, I started with an aggressive amount of research.

Brand Research

Starting us off, I turned my attention to each of the individual briefs, Eco Future, Cab-E Online and Influence Hull. It’s worth noting at this stage, that all of these names were mere suggestions and the research is more focused on the concept as opposed to the brands.

Mood Boards created in Canva (Canva, 2025), showing my competitor research for all three briefs, alongside early mockup ideas and logos.

For each brief, I felt the best way to translate my findings was to condense them into informational mood boards. Each slide showcases two different competitors, that I then went on to highlight several pros and cons. I made sure to highlight certain features such as design laws and colour palettes, to address the companies branding and storytelling. From here I then came up with a hypothetical concept for each, that I could later explore in depth if I chose to. I also felt this was a great time to create some very rough logo ideations using Canva (Canva, 2025). This is something I aim to discuss at a later point in my project but felt was worth including in my research stage as well, as they help demonstrate the combination of both my pros and cons from a design standpoint.

Overall, whilst I have a strong idea concept for each brief, I chose to move forward with the taxi company. This was largely due to the strong storytelling potential and clear visual style I felt I could communicate in my designs.

Development

As I stated, my primary choice became the taxi company brief. Thanks to my competitor research, I had established a rough branding concept I could move forward with. The first thing to focus on was my users, birthing the message of ‘for women, by women’, a way of fighting what I found was a heavily male dominated business model. I then created a couple of user personas and by setting my age bracket at a wide 16 – 45, I allowed myself the ability to fluctuate between both extremes. This boiled down to what I can only describe as a visual style of ‘Glamour Girlypop’, an amalgamation of 1950s New York glamour, Y2K and modern day pop culture icons.

I also used this stage as a great chance to do more competitor research, turning my attention to three local taxi companies. These all demonstrated similar pros and cons and my previous research, thus solidifying my rebellious take.

My Brand Personality and Brand Matrix, created using Canva (Canva, 2025)

The final step before moving on in my project, was creating a few additional brand identity formats, to help establish a clearer picture of the direction I wanted to go. This resulted in creating a brand personality chart and a brand matrix. By using fun visuals and creating four key pillars I want to solidify in my brand guidelines, I was able to grasp a very clear vision that justified my research.

References

Figma Style Board

Actual Competitor Research

Brand Matrix