Buy, sell, rent and swap, material and immaterial business assets.
We started the company with 5 co-founders, with all a unique business background. I held the position as art-director and lead designer. The company has grown to 25 full-time employees within 2 years, raised more than 3M and won the price ‘EBG top 10 – Most promising startup in France 2014’.
We started The Assets because, we believe in a more dynamic and connected economy, where business assets are easily shared and traded. Where big data is accessible for everyone. We wanted an efficient and transparent world economy. So the mission was to start an international online marketplace for business assets, where all the generated data is being shared. Bringing together supply and demand, without middleman, with the decisive information in advance.
Being invisible
One of the core values of the brand is being invisible. Providing a stage for others while being in the background our self. You find this value clearly in the products of The Assets, the designs of the web application are an excellent example of this. Light, transparent and spacious.
Experiment
I believe in finding new solutions by experimenting alongside the usual designs, even if they are not intended to be implemented. Here you find an example, a renewed, advanced search system that works through tags.
Creating the brand
The branding of ‘The Assets’ consist of a hard side and a soft side. We are dealing with people (soft) and business assets (hard). We believe in an open dynamic economy(soft), but at the same time in an efficient and organized world(hard). ‘The Assets’ is a optimist and a realist.
I did a lot of branding research to find the right brand values that inspired and brought together the divers visions of the founders. Finding the right logo was a big part of this journey. I wrote a blog article about it you can find here.
Icons
I created a multiple sets of icons for the online platform. Here you find 2 different sets. The ‘filled icons’ are used to visualise the properties of an asset, while the ‘single-line icons’ are used as interactive elements (buttons).
Online advertising
Social media campagnes were a big part of our advertising strategy. We had a great budget and I learned a lot about conversion rate through A/B Testing.
Check out some of the design I did for online promotion purposes.
Graphs & Presentations
As a fund raising start-up you need a lot of visuals and info graphics for presentations. As I’m always open-eyed by the horrific PowerPoint slides that are handed to investors, I try to make everything look good and in line with our brand before it leaves our mailbox.
The office
We renovated and decorated the place before we moved in. I fell in love with a serie of photos from Victor Habchy as it played with the border between fiction and reality, I found it a great inspiring addition to the work space. I used the same artwork for the product and advertising.
