Creative Exploration
Exploring how external perspective and creative experimentation help brands simplify their message and reconnect with their core story.
Context
Over time, infusing fresh creative thinking into a brand becomes increasingly difficult. Internal teams are often overwhelmed by what they know, try to say too much, and the core story gets lost in the process. They can be too close to the brand. Sometimes this is because all creative work is completed within the company bubble, without visibility into what others in the industry or world are doing. Sometimes it is because the internal creative team isn’t given the space to take risks and try new things. An outside perspective can be exactly what is needed to sort through the good to get to the great.
Problem
How might an external perspective help simplify the brand message, surface a stronger visual direction, and reconnect the identity with its core story?
Product & Service
Unipart Digital Enterprise System
UDES - Warehouse Management System
"A software solution that offers visibility into a business' entire inventory and manages supply chain fulfilment operations from the distribution centre to the store shelf." Simply moving inventory from A to B. Inbound: starting at the left circle (A) to the centre Warehouse (B). Outbound: starting at the centre Warehouse (A) to the right circle (B).
UDES - Order Management System
"An order management system is a tool that tracks sales, orders, inventory, and fulfilment as well as enables the people, processes, and partnerships necessary for products to find their way to the customers who bought them." PROMT - Purchase and Repair Order Management with Proactive Tracking.
UDES - eLearning Management System
"A learning management system is a software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, automation and delivery of educational courses, training programs, or learning." eLMS - Elms are deciduous and semi-deciduous trees; the "Learning Tree".
UDES - Customer Relationship Management
"Customer relationship management is one of many different approaches that allow a company to manage and analyse its own interactions with its past, current and potential customers."
UDES - Report Management System
"A complex software solution that enables you to manage the complete reporting process. It helps you to prepare high quality reports quickly and efficiently. The RMS enables you to manage reporting processes using calendar definitions."
UDES - Warehouse Control System
"A warehouse control system is a software application that directs the real-time activities within warehouses and distribution centres."
Outcome & impact
The work helped create a clearer and more consistent visual identity across the Unipart Digital Enterprise Systems product range, while maintaining alignment with the wider Unipart brand. By extending core visual elements, colour systems, and geometric patterns from the master brand, each product gained its own recognisable identity without losing connection to the wider ecosystem. The project also introduced a more modern and scalable design approach inspired by minimal geometric forms, repetition, and line-based branding trends. This created a cleaner, more flexible visual language that could work consistently across digital products, presentations, marketing material, and internal communications. Beyond the visual output, the work reinforced the importance of balancing business-focused messaging with human-centred communication, helping simplify complex enterprise products into clearer, more approachable brand stories.
Reflection
This project reinforced how valuable outside perspective can be when evolving an established brand. Internal teams often become closely attached to existing ideas and ways of working, which can make change feel risky even when improvement is needed. One of the biggest takeaways was recognising that designing for enterprise products still means designing for people. While the audience may be businesses, clarity, simplicity, familiarity, and emotional connection remain just as important. The work also highlighted how thoughtful visual systems can create consistency across a growing product ecosystem without making every product feel identical. Small, repeatable design principles, such as geometric forms, colour relationships, and visual patterns, helped create a stronger sense of unity across the UDES product range.