YUX rebranding: finding our identity as an African design firm

UX Design

Africa

Branding

Design

Logo

Dakar

Design process

Symbol

Pattern

Story of a natural evolution

3 years after the launch in May 2016 — by a group of design advocates based in Dakar — of the first UX designers community in West Africa called YUX…

We felt it was time to dig into our past and future, successes and failures, traditions and utopia…

to come up with an identity that can better reflect who we are as a team, where we want to go as a company and what we want to give back as a community enabler.

A team introspection

This design process was led by 2 of YUX’s most talented designers: Gustav, from Ghana and Salif, from Senegal.

We knew we needed an external point of view and thus added on board Joy, an amazing designer from Zimbabwe. They received weekly contributions from all of our team, leading to “intense” debates sometime !

As co-founders, we stood back as much as we could during the process to let the team express what YUX meant for them.

A 6 months design process

We started by asking ourselves what is YUX, where it comes from and where it is going. Community, sharing, culture, future, digital where some of the words that popped up often in these moments.

Then the team looked into ancient African art and natureto see what colors, patterns and shapes can inspire us and can be compatible with our futuristic vision.

Based in these, We created various propositions for a symbol and a pattern. We iterated on our favorites and came up with the final ones, explained below. We added a new font, the colors and a complete design guideline.

Finally, our a new tagline came very naturally: African Digital Experiences, created together