Venbrook Insurance Group
My first consulting gig post-Bluecrew in 2024 was for the former CMO of Green Dot Brooke Lais at her new position with Venbrook Insurance Group – one of the leaders in the private insurance space. It was great to work with her again.
An initial direction had been established and now needed to be rolled out throughout the rest of the developing site. The limited engagement involved designing 20+ pages with design, copy & imagery updates using an off-the-shelf design system from Relume. This was my first experience using a pre-built design system. Relume does a great job providing a complete system that provided a great starting point for the redesign.
Melding with the existing team
I worked together with the marketing team, the developer & the copywriter in Figma incorporating live feedback into the designs every step of the way. Part of the work involved modifying & extending the design system to suit the custom requirements of the design, a job made easier by the meticulous hinting & configuration settings provided in the design system. I’m guessing that design system saved Venbrook $10-20k in design time.
Venbrook pins their value to characteristics like reliability, flexibility & service. The aesthetic of the private insurance space in general reflects these values and takes a very conservative approach to design. This was not a project where we were going to invent any new design rules or break any new ground visually, so standard, recognizable UX patterns were just the thing to accentuate the contents of the site and set the right tone for the brand.
Iconography
The Relume design system came with a pretty robust set of icons, but for a specialty client like this several custom icons were needed to represent the unique concepts of the service offering. Iconography is always a nice opportunity to imbue the design with some nice little conceptual touches as with the marijuana insurance. They need to be sufficiently abstract, yet adequately representative of the concept. That one in particular needed to capture the essence without being overly 420. The lotus flower for work.life balance, the meteor for risk : these were not ones I thought would fly for this project so it was nice to see them make it in.
Results
The new site is performing well above expectations. Granted, this is due to a combination of the new design, SEO & social marketing. Undoubtedly the new design is an improvement over the previous design (which internally was described as “corporate vampire”), and the new design system & CMS makes it easy to stand up new pages with minimal effort.
It’s always nice to be invited to work with former colleagues on new projects. That vote of confidence provides a lot of validation that I do good work. I love these consulting gigs. They let me parachute in, get up and running quickly, do a lot of good in a short amount of time and see good results. Delivering a complete new design on time and within budget was a real plus.