Problem

Data is everything in today's world. For companies and organizations, the easier it is for to interact with your audience, the easier it becomes to execute your unique practices and amplify productivity. The problem arises however in finding or building custom solutions that can fit to the needs of a business.

A platform or service that was more powerful than free options, more personalized than enterprise solutions, and less demanding than software development, would be something that could provide the benefit data supplies, while not asking a business to make compromises or sacrifices.

Context

I was brought in to support and advise in the launching of a new company, Anvilor, which specializes in crafting custom data collection applications, targeted primarily at non-profit entities. Anvilor is a platform and a service: driven by a team of experienced business strategies and data specialists, these professionals utilize Anvilor's platform, a tool that streamlines the process of constructing custom form, surveys, and applications. With a powerful tool, and seasoned team, Anvilor finds a middle way between custom software development and enterprise solutions.

Setting the stage

My first role with Anvilor was to help develop an brand for the company. Before I entered, Anvilor was a company with a lot of potential, yet was unclear about who and what it was going to be.

By speaking with the founder and team members, I dived into what the vision was, how the company saw itself, its strengths and weaknesses, its purpose, its values, and its character. These questions and conversations were helpful not just for me, but also for the team, as they found helpful the exercise of exploring and challenging their own intuition and aspirations.

As I gathered more and more input, I slowly began to piece together a identity that felt like it embodied what Anvilor was going to be. It was encouraging to see the vision become clearer in the eyes of the Anvilor team, and my own understanding of what my palette would be as a designer was improved in turn.

Visual Design

One of my key tasks was to develop a logo and visual identity for Anvilor that aligned with the overall brand identity I had interviewed about. I had two main sources of inspiration for the Anvilor logo.

1. In my discussions with the team, I found they were most proud of how smart Anvilor was and could be. Being a platform that was build with data for data, it's customizable logic allowed for endless possibilities. To honor this, I tried to find ways of incorporating logical operators, and computational imagery into the design.

2. The name "Anvilor" clearly and rightly invokes the idea of an anvil. The Anvilor team calls themselves "Appsmiths," a play on words that embodies the spirit of a craftsman, like a blacksmith or leathersmith. This concept of a professional mastering a tool to create custom goods is very apt for what Anvilor is trying to do, and I wanted to pay homage to that.

The wordmark

In the end, no logo ended up more compelling than the Anvilor wordmark I came up with. Rooted in the font PT Mono, the character "v" serves also as the "a," and, when combined with the stylized l, becomes the trio of logical operators. Remove the tit from the "i", and it pairs with "o" to become binary bits. This wordmark is imbued with tech symbolism, but the lowercase letters and tall x-height bring the design down to earth. We wanted Anvilor to be a company that brings technology to a human level, like how a blacksmith brings ironwork to a human level. We feel this wordmark conveys those sentiments.

Web design

The website for Anvilor was slotted to take about two months to put together; design, copy writing, and development included. I would be responsible for the visuals and development, and work side-by-side with the company to refine their message and translate it to something that could be conveyed on the web.

Creating the narrative

The product website would be crucial for pitching the product to customers and telling our story. Over the course of my interviewing stage, through repeated rounds of questioning and follow-up, I pushed the company towards a more and more precise product definition and product vision. By prompting them to articulate their ideas to me, it provided us with the perfect material with which to start a our campaign.

The first step was outlining the narrative. In picking out the essentials elements of our message, we organized our talking points, evidence, and arguments into distinct buckets. I then began wireframing ways in which we could articulate those elements.

A steady march

The wireframes progressed gradually from low to high-fidelity over the course of several weeks. My experience in Figma, and the close rapport I had with the company meant the back and forth nature of design and feedback lent itself to a rapid progression toward an effective and agreed upon design.

This process was quite fluid, and we naturally landed on a strategy that relied more on incremental progress across the board as opposed to large advancements in siloed areas. It was not uncommon to see a new section layout influence the visual aesthetic, or the narrative to influence the page structure, and vice versa. While on any given day there may only have been a few seemingly disjointed steps forward, looking back, it was a steady march on many fronts towards a successful final product.

Honing in on the aesthetic

With a brand color set ahead of time, I worked within the world of purple. Purple is the color of royalty, and for most of human history was inaccessible to humans. Purple dyes were extremely rare, and it wasn't until the 19th century that they reached the masses. This sudden revelation meant that in a blink, purple was the color of modernity.

Today, purple is often associated with luxury, but it also brings forth notions of creativity and wisdom. These latter qualities really exemplify the Anvilor platform with the Appsmiths at the helm. For what it's worth, there has been a surge in tech start ups that utilize this color, alongside giants like Yahoo, Twitch, and Discord.

In the visual language for anvilor, I aimed to find something that melded the professional, experienced nature of the team, with a down to earth, progressive technological product.

With time, we landing on a brighter and lighter look, using soft gradients, inner glows, and smooth animations.

Naturally, there were areas which were workshopped during development, but the strong level of communication again benefitted our production process. Changes to the messaging meant that the site needed to adapt to accomodate the new narrative, but with a lightweight construction and my CSS support classes meant alterations were easy to handle.

UX & Product Design

In addition to my contributions in design, brand identity, and web development for Anvilor solutions, I have served in a advisory role for user experience; specifically tasked with improving the workflows for the Appsmith team to more efficiently produce data management solutions. One such example of these contributions is articulated in the following section.

Problem

The Appsmith team used a set deployment workflow which, although familiar and comfortable, presented significant limitations when interfacing with client infrastructures that differed from their internal systems. The team used distinct environments (development, staging, production) to build and test applications. This rigid structure became a bottleneck when adapting solutions to client environments, which could have fewer or more endpoints, or required A/B testing.

Moreover, the existing migration process was cumbersome. Moving code between environments required manual adjustments to logic and configuration data, making it not only time-consuming but also prone to errors, adding unnecessary overhead and slowing down solution delivery.

Insights and strategy

Through discussions with the Appsmith team and product lead, it became apparent that there were two main insights would eventually drive the redesigned deployment flow:

1. The logic and permissions were the only things that changed from environment to environment—not the form itself. By separating the form and logic, we could isolate the form, and handle the logic separately.
2. The deployment flow needed to work regardless of where it was aiming. This new paradigm would need to accomodate any situation. We had to work with a black box.

Redesign

In rethinking this process, I started with where we wanted to begin, and where we wanted to end up. There should be a single location with which the Appsmith work, and a black box where the published form would land. From here, I began adding other known constraints, so that I would not influence the solution prematurely. In doing this, applying constraints without forcing anything, the solutions seemed to formulate itself naturally.

What I would eventually come too was a solution with two key characteristics:

• The Appsmiths would work from a unified environment where they can manage deployments without transitioning between different areas
• Logic and credentials were to be encapsulated into interchangeable modules, making it easy to adapt to various client environments

This deployment process is structured in such a way that it allows for the form to be agnostic of the black box it is deployed to. By divorcing the logic and credentials from the form into interchangeable code, we ask the Appsmith to change only what is needed. Additionally, I suggested an advancement that would allow code to be shared across these logic blocks as functions, employing the computer science principle of inheritance. This way, code that may persist across logic blocks would be updated as one, without which we would be back in a position akin to where we started.

Moving forward

As Anvilor grows as a company, it will morph and evolve as it finds itself, and I will be eager to see what the team will be able to accomplish. I have and continue to appreciate working alongside this team helping to better define what it means to be Anvilor, as well as improve the processes and solutions they produce so that they may better serve their clients and the good work that they do.