DEN
The power of digital transformation through future-proof design
From preserving the past to building the future, what happens when your organization commits to a major shift in focus? When our client DEN faced this challenge, we designed a radical transformation of the brand, its strategy, and their platform.
A future-focused strategic approach
We kicked off DEN's transformation by creating a clear understanding of their purpose, mission, competitive landscape, and, most importantly, their audiences.
Our key insight? DEN can create a movement for digital transformation by empowering a community of firestarters within organizations. Armed with this strategic foundation, our visual, UX, and development teams were able to get to work.
A dynamic logo for a future-oriented brand
We designed a typographic animated logo and went for a stretched E to depict dynamism and modernity. Our design team added animation to the patterns and aligned them with DEN’s mission to drive cultural transformation.
We created a logo that could flexibly stretch and shrink based on screen size. This adaptability reinforces DEN’s progressive and inclusive values – and looks spectacular across a range of devices.
A progressive brand identity for a purpose-driven institute
DEN’s color palette expands the traditional spectrum with additional colors and versatile shades. We carefully selected color combinations to ensure readability and accessibility scalability across all design aspects to create an identity system that is tasteful and impactful. Our collaboration resulted in an identity that clearly reflects the institute’s core values of drive, inspiration, connectivity, and practical application.
Video manifesto for digital leaders
Digital transformation can be a techy and complicated story to explain. To inspire cultural organizations to embrace its power, we created a rallying cry in the form of a video manifesto that speaks directly to firestarters – encouraging them to take the first step today.
To further illuminate the meaning of transformation and its exciting possibilities for the cultural sector, we created a set of animated illustrations that come to life in DEN’s new brand colors. While innovation is often portrayed with boring and distant imagery, our new visual language is all about making meaningful connections with real people – the cultural audiences of the future.
A new platform for digital transformation
We translated the brand identity into a fluid, engaging, and functional website that the DEN team can effortlessly update on their own. We built a custom authoring experience on Craft CMS with multilingual support for Dutch and English. They also integrated a tagging and category system into the website’s publishing platform. The DEN team can now manage and publish easily searchable content across their website, ensuring consistency in content and design.
The whole website was built with custom layouts and components, which enables the DEN team to easily build new pages with a harmonious look and feel, ensuring a cohesive user experience.
Signature illustrations with endless variety
We reinforced the brand’s personality with animated illustrations that illuminate the concept of digital transformation and showcase inspiring possibilities for the cultural sector. All illustrations were created in-house and designed in black-and-white first. This way each of DEN’s vibrant new brand colors can be layered on top. This creates a rich library of high-quality illustrations that can vary across channels.
We crafted a distinctive color palette guideline to guarantee a consistently diverse brand experience, even in collaborations with external illustrators. This allows new talent to be showcased and adds to the brand's distinctive visual identity.
