I was approached by a family member who had an idea for a business. The idea is something along the lines of a content design system provider.
Content, specifically content design, is often overlooked within UX and design spaces, purely for efficiency and not aligning too well with Swift methodologies. They currently work as a content designer, lead content, or head of content and they believe they've spotted a gap in the market. We can utilise AI to provide design teams and businesses with regimented and constructed content design systems to make sure that their content is aligned and offers as much value as possible.
Seeing as they are Head of Content, this means that their design skills aren't the best. That's why they've approached me to be a kind of founding designer for this project. That means I'll be focusing more on the visuals, brand, and overall identity of the business.
I don't believe my strength is in branding so I've got off to a bit of a rocky start. In all honesty I believe my strengths lie more in problem solving and UI creation.
With that in mind I have been brainstorming a lot. I feel like the identity should come first with a project like this and then we can branch out from there in terms of what the UI is like, setting up a design system and libraries, and figuring out the components that'll be used.
Since I was approached to work on this project, it has started without me, but only in a very rudimentary foundational way. A GitHub repo has been established with clear rules on how to add to the project, what my responsibilities are, and the like, and a name has already been settled on. That name is Pattern and Prose, which I think is a delightful name, linking the kind of design system aspect and the literary aspect together into one nice name.
My one piece of criticism of the name would be that it's quite long, especially for what is a software business or a tool business, a software tool. That's been something I've been kind of working against in terms of branding, as it becomes quite a heavy wordmark, especially paired with a logo.
A really rudimentary mockup for about 12 or so pages has been created. It is all very bland, filled with what seems to be kind of surface-level content for the meantime, which is fine. I'm not really touching that just yet as I'm considering the brand but it's nice to know it's there. I can use it for potential mockups and visualisations of what I might be picturing.