UI Project

Ascenda Website

Ascenda is an E2E loyalty solutions provider for financial institutions worldwide. In the past, the company has adopted a more corporate look-and-feel in their identity to attract large bank corporations. To cater to the fast-growing fintech segment, Ascenda continued to evolve its value proposition and offering to meet the needs of a wider audience, such as the digital banks. With the shift in their direction, the company's leadership team wants to revamp the website to portray a young and smart look, matching the new audience's personality.

The task
Develop a fresh look for Ascenda website to be more appealing to the new target audience.

Responsibility:
Lead the overall process from conceptual to execution and hands-on UI.

Visit Ascenda website

It starts with style scapes

In 2018, the company introduced simple yet dynamic parallelogram shapes to depict the company's values that are all about being agile, fast and simple. The visuals are accompanied with corporate dark blue color to portray sophistication. Leveraging on the new look and feel that is rooted on its core values, I further elevate the branding by incorporating the parallelogram shape in creative ways, such as framing images and overlapping the shape to create dynamic, outbound effect; rather than just on the logo as how it was mostly used.

The design team created several style scapes and presented these scapes to our stakeholders for their alignment. The discussion is essential to figure out details and preferences such as the possibility of adding a new striking color to give a fresh touch to the brand, what kind of device/illustration suits the new approach, etc. When the details are aligned, we drafted several homepage UI, streamlined the options, exchanged some small details, made some iterations, and finalized the UI.

Bringing it to life with animation

From the beginning of ideation, animation was part of the roadmap in this project. It creates the dynamics and gives a nice touch to the final look. After 2 months of work, the website launched in June 2021 and it doesn’t take long for the animation task to kick off.

We researched some animation types and found that CSS and JSON are the perfect ones to achieve what we have in mind within a short timeframe, without adding complexity to the website. We created several storyboards before developing the final animation, to finalized the storyline and align them with developers. This task was completed in 1.5 months, some are pure CSS styling while others are JSON files created with After Effects by our designer(s).