Seatfrog works with innovative partners throughout the travel industry to reinvent what travellers can do when they’re on the go. Among plenty of features, their bidding system gives the opportunity to grab a last minute upgrade to business class when it suits you. They work with some of the best talents around the world.
During a year in Seatfrog I haven’t work only on the product but also on the Visual side of things. I took ownership of Seatfrog’s brand and made the general aesthetics of the company consistent.
Seatfrog is a young startup. In only a few years they became the leaders in the train trips upgrades in UK. Do they want to stop here? Nope. They want to conquer the world. No less.
For this, they needed a consistant brand that could be used transversally through its teams. I’ve often worked with the Heads of different squad: Product, Data, Sales, Dev, Operations and Marketing.
Showcasing here all the work I’ve done during this year would make no sense. I listed here 3 main areas where Visual Design had a big impact in the business.
Before even designing anything, I did a big audit of the situation in Seatfrog. The Google Drive was full of documents and there were almost no structure. Every time I was approaching a problem I setup the business objectives and establish a strategy plan.
I then gathered all those elements on a timeline and established the pain points and opportunities of each of the design decisions.
As Seatfrog is young and has increased incredibly fast, lots of design elements haven’t been touched for years. There were not much of organisation nor consistency in the designs. The Head of Product Design is an amazing designer and won a lot of awards during his career. He wanted someone next to him who structures the brand.
I started to collect all the design components across the business and designed a Design Library that will be turn into a big Design System in a near future. To do so, I used the famous Design System Management from Invision (DSM). As every design system worthy of the names, I gave it a name: Froggy. The teams could see the design guidelines, download our fonts, use our colours, icons, imagery, etc.
Because our Google Drive was full and not well organised, I decided to create a Notion page for all of our teams. There, they can find everything they need with the links directing to the drive. App assets, sales material, partner resources, data and reporting, UX resources, etc. Everything was listed to help our teams to have a better clarity and not losing time finding what they want.
I decided to create a Master Deck in Keynote for all our teams. This deck was 120 slides long and included a very-well detailed style guide. I did a presentation in front of all of our teams to introduce this deck. They can use it for their presentations and their internal meetings.
Seatfrog wanted to drive more conversion, improve its messaging and better promote its brand and position on the market via its emails. You can find here the full-detailed case study. But before this project starts, I was in charge of designing our emails in collaboration with the Head of Marketing, and build it in Campaign Monitor.
There I could be creative and I produced some illustrations and videos for our emails. I could be creative as well for our different marketing campaigns.
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The Sales team used to work under lots of pressure. They needed assets in the last-minute pretty much every time. I decided to structure our work better and give them more autonomy by providing a lot of reusable assets. Among others, I created for them a Sales Deck, 2 One Pager for their exhibitions, a template for any RFP/RFI (Request for Proposal/Information) they would need to answer. Oh! Also a design stand, for their special events.
After one year in Seatfrog, the teams are now well-organised and autonomous. They don’t need to call the Design or Product Team to deliver nice-looking collaterals or presentations. And if they do, it’s a lot faster than before.
Not coming from a design background, being the Visual Designer of this amazing startup taught me a lot. Everything I learnt there helped me to be a better UI Designer. Having taken the entire ownership of the emails, the brands and working closely with all the Heads of each team helped me to understand the business and ask clear briefs from each team member. Working at Seatfrog was almost like working with clients in an agency environment. A thing to do once in its life of designer!
