AEGON UK Digital branding
| Fact |
Value |
| Contact |
London |
| Client |
AEGON UK |
| Project |
Digital branding |
| Industry |
Financial Services |
| Timeline |
9 Months
May 06 - Feb 07 |
| Services |
Brand Guidelines
Interactive Design
|
| Team size |
5 The Brand Union
3 Client |
| Results | After launch, page views increased by 81% |
|---|
Digital guidelines
We felt that the best way to deliver digital guidelines was as a website. Not only are the digital guidelines extensive and highly detailed but they also represent a best case example of a working AEGON website implementing the rules it contains.
As part of a rebranding project for AEGON UK, The Brand Union was asked to look at how our new corporate design work could be translated for AEGON's digital services.
The new AEGON UK digital applications communicate the brand without sacrificing functionality and usability
The digital branding for AEGON UK was a huge project in itself. We were asked to provide new designs for their website; a set of designs to be used for their many sub-brand websites; a re-paint design for their intranet; designs for Micro-sites; Email templates; process navigation design including iconography, and a full set of digital branding guidelines.
Positive and negative space
One of the key challenges was how to bring out the themes and imagery of the print work in a medium where accessibility and usability must always come first.
The brochure and layout designs for AEGON UK were based around the idea of creating positivie and negative spaces using shapes of solid colours and some beautiful abstract photography. For the digital designs, these shapes and imagery had to be present but could not intefere with the functionality of layouts.
The solution to this problem was to create specific areas where these shapes could be used. We created areas that were functionally separate from the main content but which gave the page a uniform AEGON look and feel. These areas were the headings and footers on web pages and email templates, and a large Flash area on the web homepage.
Digital specific design
We needed to create new styles for specific digital requirements, such as live text typography echoing the print work, live text information tables and iconography for certain applications such as online forms.
Panels
The web pages needed to show a lot of different types of information in a small space, so we created a number of different information panels which are differentiated by their design and placement on the page. Their functions vary from promotional spaces with imagery to lists of related links.
Online advertising
Our outline for online advertising presented its own problems because of the very small amount of space available. For the smaller banners a unique arrangement of the logo had to be created.
Email
A successful email template must be kept as simple as possible in terms of layout and imagery used because of the many different email programs an email may be opened with. We created templates for press releases, news updates and general use which included a simple version of the web headers and footers and a one or two column grid. The result was a clean and clear set of templates which carried through the AEGON branding nicely.
An all-positive outcome
The digital team at AEGON UK were great to work with. It is always nerve-wracking to hand over your designs to be implemented 'out of house', but they stuck to our designs and guidelines with unprecedented precision which resulted in a very pleasing-looking website. AEGON UK digital applications now communicate their brand clearly without sacrificing functionality and usability.
An initial report from the first 30 days after the brand launch showed a huge increase in visitors and page hits.
