The Challenge
Barclays was unwinding its stake in its African business, so Absa had to separate from the Barclays brand and stand up a digital identity of its own. The work covered the corporate and investment banking platforms, across several countries and more than one brand, while the bank carried on trading.
The Opportunity
The separation meant every digital platform had to be rebuilt anyway. That made it the moment to stop designing each platform on its own terms and put one system underneath all of them.
The Process
We chose a minimalistic design language, and then the difficult part began: Absa clients in different countries had different requirements, across a multitude of African languages. The solution was a design system that could absorb that variation without fracturing the experience.
SOLAR, the design system. Click any sheet to enlarge →
What it unlocked
The system let us roll the Barclays-to-Absa rebrand across every digital platform while the bank kept serving millions of customers, one central place to change things, shared by every designer on the digital estate. The exploration work covered Absa CIB and Absa Access.
Built from the system →