wize.life AG
Employed as Creative Director at Wizelife AG, former Seniorbook AG, I did all kinds of tasks and projects for seniorbook and then wize.life, the leading community and platform for best agers in Germany. Most important was to be the point of intersection between management/sales, ad management, product management and the developers. Turning ideas into prototypes and mockups and planning the next development sprints was my job. By taking care of online and print campaigns, presentations and tasks down to creating new business cards I wanted to ensure design coherence. Rebranding seniorbook to wize.life was one of the biggest projects and successfully accelerated further growth of the platform, which is now in the top ten of Germany’s social publishers.
One of my biggest projects was to redesign seniorbook to the new brand wize.life, under the restriction, that the basic layout grid, the ad space and the technical foundation should remain roughly the same (though I would have loved to start on a clean sheet of paper).
The project started with a couple of workshops where I tried to settle on the main rebranding goals together with the management and marketing team. After we had an idea and an identity of the new brand the degrees of design freedom had to be explored and a timeframe had to be set up with the developers. Last but not least another workshop with a couple of lead users was set up to identify painpoints in the current UX.
And then the work started. On paper, as usual, and with lots of post-its. After that I switched to Sketch, my meanwhile favourite tool for wireframing and responsive screendesign.
Also the Messenger app had to be redesigned and aligned with the new CI, based on the existing app design of the previous version and brand. Developed as a hybrid app, the look and feel should be as native as possible, both for Android and iOS platforms.
Rebranding seniorbook without starting a revolution was a big project. The product shouldn’t or couldn’t change that much, the brand was intended to be less restrictive regarding their target group. It should appeal to the 35plus as well as to the 60plus, getting across a feeling of being relaxed, somehow detached from too short-living trends, attracting people who have lived their lives to some point, who know their place in life. More grown-up than other brands and online platforms.
The new brand itself was developed in a couple of workshops, together with the management team. In the end we focused on the positive aspects of getting older, one of which is to have gained some amount of wisdom. It was decided to go with wize spelled with a z instead of an s, this „edge“ was later on emphasized and played with in the logo.
