Yousign Design Studio’s journey
Woop woop ! 🎉
Hello friends! This is our first publication on this Yousign Design Studio blog, and we hope it will be the first of many more to come after!
For the occasion, we would like to introduce you each member of our great team (who also happen to be this blog’s contributors), before telling you the story of its creation.
… and, that’s it. Yes, we are still a small team, and we like to define ourselves as in « work in progress ». So, why did we create an official team with so few members, and why now? Let us explain the background of Design in Yousign.
The first age — The naive age 👶
First of all, we have to specify that Yousign is a young company (we celebrated its sixth anniversary this year). 🎉
During this first age, between 2016 and 2018, Yousign had to prove that it was a company that customers can trust, that its product was secure and legally-binding, etc. Basically that Yousign had its place on the eSignature market.
The first designer’s mission at that time was to create the brand identity and renew the application design keywords that reflect the reliability and the constancy of the company. The image we showed, had nothing to do with the idea of humanity, proximity or even warmness. The priority at that point was different, we were focused on this mission of reassuring customers on the technical aspects.
As we just said, Yousign is a young company and during this « rock’n’roll » age 🤘, designers had to do their best in the « start-up » way : no clear organization or process, no stability, etc. It was a time of innocence, but still very fun to live through as an experience. We learned a lot in bringing solutions and compromises together in a short amount of time. 👍
And to finish describing this phase, it was the beginning of the « partitioning » organization, in the way that there was one creative developer who was mostly working on the application, and one art director working more on all the marketing assets. The result was a tech-oriented product instead of a user-experience oriented one, while having a very graphics-oriented representation on the marketing side. It was difficult to keep consistency with this split within the design team. Actually one could argue that we didn’t even have a design team…
The intermediate age — The teenager age 🌱
At the end of 2018, Yousign wanted to evolve: it was not a baby start-up anymore and the whole team wanted to assume our ambition to become a serious European leader on the eSignature market. 🇪🇺
No one was really improving the product anymore at this time (meaning the user experience), and the idea was just to add new features as smoothly as possible, praying that everything ends up fitting well. 🙊
Fortunately, Nico was hired not longer after this in the product team and his main mission was to redesign the whole application, more user-centric-ly.
That was a great step forward, for the product and for Yousign! But it was not enough because the division was still present: Nico was working mostly on the app, on UI and UX aspects, and Lea was driving the second rebrand of Yousign. We tried to manage to the best of our abilities the fact that we were not on the same mission or in the same team. It was still difficult to keep consistency in this situation, and it was frustrating to finally be several designers in Yousign but still not being able to effectively work together. The planning was not enabling us to share our work as each of us had their own priorities.
So the only way to improve the Design in Yousign was to rethink our working habits…
The maturity age — The WIP team 🚧
It was enough: after the redesign of the brand, the launch of the new website and a great work on the application, the time had come to join forces and work together as a team. What a pleasure it was to finally not feel alone anymore and be supported by each member of this new Design Studio! 🎉
Now as we are finally a team, we can keep consistency between the product and the brand. We share every week our planning and priorities, we can work on several subjects, no matter if it’s a product, marketing or any other projects. Obviously, we each have our tastes and our specialities but we think that it’s part of the job to be concerned by all design subjects.
We feel more creative in this way and we finally could work as a “service center” for all the teams in Yousign. We are self-organized and we are happy to deliver assets, mockups and other stuff designed for every member of Yousign. Mostly, we respond to requests from the Product and Marketing teams, but it is crucial for us that everybody who is working at Yousign can talk to us about a project or an issue that the Design team can solve.
Why this blog?
So, what are we going to share in this blog ?
As we said, we are a “WIP team”. We think that we have a lot to learn and we are trying to integrate processes step by step, doing our best to support and carry on our way the evolution of the company. We are convinced that Design can solve problems and that’s why it’s crucial for Yousign.
Our goal is to share here our experiments and our steps in the growth of the team. We will share about our best practices and will make honest feedbacks about tools or about workshops we would have set up. We are obviously attentive to design trends coming and going, and it’s not impossible that we’ll express our impressions and analyses about them. 😉
Some topics may appear apart from Design, but why not share about our other passions, our daily discoveries and other subjects which seem important to our lives?
We love to go to see exhibitions or concerts, you will probably read about our feelings on these topics too. 😄
Follow our journey!
It is new for us, but we are very excited to share about all these subjects. We will also share our work on dribbble and behance so feel free to follow our journey there too! 😉
