Inside the Thimble Aesthetic

In the journey to develop the new Thimble brand, our design system has evolved to match our aspirations as a new school contender in and old school industry.

What do most designers think about the prospect of designing for the insurance industry…? Boring? Bland? Out of touch? Not interested? Probably all of the aforementioned! You can’t blame them, really.!

The insurance industry is one of the last verticals within financial services to be substantially affected by technology, and public perception of the industry is that it lacks excitement and innovation. However, all that is changing... and with that change comes a whole suite of problems ripe to be solved with modern design practices.

The Starting Point: Black, Yellow, and Uncanny Valley All Over

Verifly, while an innovative insurance product, was originally built for drone pilots three years ago. It has since evolved to offer business insurance to over 160 professions. As one of the new school insurance brands that emerged within the space to disrupt the industry with on-demand insurance offerings, Verifly was very much due for a rebrand.
It was time.

The name, the look and feel with which Verifly made its entrance needed a refresh. The black and yellow branding, colors often synonymous with DANGER! WARNING! and insects that sting!combined with the mid-century oil painting portraiture aesthetic that dominated the site and app were not aging well.

The initial intent of the regal painting illustrations was to make users feel empowered to have more granular control over their business insurance needs. But over time we felt they started to look a bit, well… creepy.

The Challenge: A Visual Aesthetic to Match Our Values and Value Proposition

Our new brand needed a visual aesthetic that resonated better with users. Working with branding agency Red Antler, the challenge was setto develop a new brand identity. The brief was simple (yet hard!): we wanted something that was new, modern, and techy yet established and trustworthy enough that you’d be comfortable using Thimble for your insurance needs.

Once these challenges had been addressed, the resulting brand identity would form the basis for a design system. This design system would help shape user interfaces with our new visual language, in turn allowing the organization to define a new zero point reference to move forward from.

The Resolution (Drumroll, Please…)

Blue is used in many corporate logos for a reason. The psychology of the color blue is said to evoke reassurance and trustworthiness as well as calm and serenity. The new Thimble brand direction needed to capture some of these values while not being lost in a sea of similar corporate branding.

After a long assessment with Red Antler on corporate brand colors being used across various financial and technology industry verticals, we zeroed in on green as the primary color to be used in our new brand palette. This color seemed to be underused in the financial sector, where many traditional brands have opted for blue or red.

The decision was also made to forgo using illustrations all together and opt for photo objects to showcase the various categories the product offers. This offered a cleaner look and laid the foundations for future experimentation with photographic or even 3D object imagery.

Developing Our Design System

With an increasingly complex platform spanning web and mobile apps, Thimble had reached a stage where it needed a design system, to provide consistency and order. Not only can design systems help keep everyone on the same page in terms of being on brand;they are also a living, breathing set of guidelines and tools that can scale and grow with the company and be integrated into various facets of product development cycles and organizational processes.

With Sketch being the main design tool of choice, (Figma would come into play at a later date but THAT is another blog post) it was time to take advantage of its cloud features to combine the new brand direction with a pattern library that would be hosted in the cloud and made available for all designers as a single source of truth for all UI components.
A full audit of every single UI component was done to start architecting the foundations of a design system. The design system would help to eliminate any inconsistencies with the previous UI elements and keep snowflake components to a minimum. Some basic primitives were defined for grids and layouts that set the foundation for introducing UI elements with the new visual language into the system.

Accessibility was also an integral part of the new design system, with great care being taken to make sure everything that was part of the system conformed to accessibility standards.This would also mark the beginning of the formation ofour own internal pattern library of proven, reusable components and design paradigms.A primary goal of this exercises was to create a system that would provide consistency and facilitate easy collaboration with the development teams during the design process.

What’s Next

What with the industry jargon and complex legal terms and conditions, insurance can often be more complicated than it needs to be for consumers. The Thimble rebrand offered the opportunity to redefine our existing user experience, prioritizing intuitiveness and simplicity as part of the new visual language. The final design direction was able to stand out from other competitors in the space while still retaining the feel of a trustworthy financial institution from a modern era.

This is just the beginning, but it is already clear that the results of this initial effort have spurred a huge transformation. The difference between the newly launched rebrand and the prior experience is night and day. Moving forward, our focus will be on scaling and refiningour design language to fit the needs of the organization as it grows and our platform evolves while ensuring the Design System can be translated to other design tools such as Figma.