Karhu Helsinki

Karhu Helsinki is digital agency specialised in designing and building websites on Drupal and WordPress.

My role

Brand design, UI design, UX, art direction, video editing, animation, collateral

Design tools

Adobe XD, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects (Lottie animations)

Agency

Karhu Helsinki

Year

2022

CMS

Wordpress

Design & experience

I worked at Karhu as a Creative Director in 2010-2022 which meant it was my job to design our brand facelift for 2022 onwards. I designed the logo and previous look in 2016 which were the basis for this refreshed and lighter design.

The goal was to create a refreshed and modern design that's both accessible and fun while presenting Karhu's services in an easily understandable way and drawing in potential new customers and leads.

My XD design file consisted of 48 layouts including page and module templates and different screen sizes.

I used Adobe After Effects to create some additional simple Lottie animations from the bear illustrations drawn by our illustrator.

We already had a good understanding of the demographics and user personas visiting the website and the people and customers we wanted to attract and serve on the site. Heat map testing was conducted on the old site as well on the new site after launch to better understand user journeys and how people preferred to access and view certain information like services and leaving a contact or quote request.

The heart of the website is the blog which brings a lot of traffic from search engines and is directly used as a marketing tool writing about things our potential customers are interested and affected about like current changes in privacy laws, cookies, analytics and web technology.

Karhu in Finnish means a bear. Karhu Helsinki donates from every website project to protection efforts of polar bears.

We named our conference spaces after types of snow in Finnish. "Kuura" means frost.

I created templates for the website, business cards, folders, documents, letters, stickers, slide shows, room signs, window tapings, office wallpapers and a neon sign for the building.

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