Brand Design at Shopee
Written by Estella, Brand Design Lead
“When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”
This old adage refers to the importance of adapting yourself to the people’s customs in a particular place or situation and behaving as they do. And we agree entirely. However, to us, it doesn’t just apply to behaviours and customs.
The Role of Brand Design at Shopee
As a multinational company serving Southeast Asia and the Latin American markets, Shopee focuses heavily on localising our strategies. What this means is that our communications and designs are often customised to what local users and businesses prefer. And this strategy has proven to be our advantage over competitors.
This also means that as the Brand Design team at Shopee, we should abandon the conventional process where regional teams define the brand guidelines and local teams obey without question. This traditional way of collaboration no longer works, especially from the execution and localisation perspective.
There are more than 500 graphic designers at Shopee and growing. Their daily work includes producing numerous operational graphics — fast — to support our expanding business.
So how can I, as the Brand Design lead, provide proper brand guidance to the designers without limiting their creative expression? I started pondering this question as I joined the team and explored a more empowering approach: empowering local market designs, not controlling.
Through thorough research to understand the design production context at Shopee, I was able to establish our core strategies into two main parts:
- Leading designs by providing regional brand guidance and showcase;
- Improving design efficiency and consistency with brand asset libraries and tools.
Leading Designs by Providing Regional Brand Guidance and Showcase
1. Regional Brand Guidance
Defining guidelines for Shopee was not an easy feat. The most stressful part was the lack of a solid foundation and open book for designers to understand design directions. As a result, information was often scattered.
To start us off, we researched and gathered designs from regional and local teams to further understand our current strategy. We came to realise just how complex the design scenarios were. There were many different channels involved, including in-app, online marketing, video, social media, employer branding, etc.
With a bird’s eye view of our past design work, we could then evaluate the fundamental brand elements and level of detail we needed to define in the guideline. We concluded that we should only lay out the most high-level and general brand guidance and design principles. That way, local teams could easily adhere to the principles and adapt them to local business needs, no matter the cultural context.
In the guideline-defining process, we also continuously asked for feedback from other teams to ensure the content we delivered was beneficial. Then, we kept iterating as per their feedback.
Finally, after weeks of a painstaking process, we built a comprehensive and inclusive brand system to reflect our motto, ‘Simple, Happy, Together’. This system entails guidelines for our logo, icons, colours, illustrations, typography, and overall corporate branding.
Particularly for the illustration and typography, we also took into consideration the multicultural factors when developing our guideline:
a. Illustration Guideline
We showcased our users’ diversity through various skin tones while simultaneously being mindful of cultural metaphors.
Our simple, straightforward approach was meant to cut through the noise and convey messages effectively. Additionally, we also wanted to help designers pick up the style quickly. So we made the illustrations as uncomplicated as possible to avoid visual fatigue and cultural misunderstanding.
To achieve this, we created objects based on structured geometric shapes and refrained from excessively using organic shapes.
b. Typography Guideline
The cross-cultural markets that Shopee serves use different languages and scripts.
To provide a pleasant reading experience and consistent design quality for all local users, we created ShopeeFont. It is an in-house typeface comprising 2 script systems, Latin and Thai, and is suitable for use as a headline in graphic design due to its bold look.
We also defined three font-pairing solutions based on script systems and specified line heights for different languages. For instance, Thai, with its additional symbols extending up and down, and Chinese, with its character complexity, require more space.
2. Showcase
We strive to lead the designs and improve visual quality by producing more design showcases. For example, in the corporate branding project, we defined the art direction and provided basic templates that local teams can quickly adapt for their usage. This allowed us to work towards a more consistent corporate identity.
We also initiated other design projects, such as holiday motion graphic posts for social media. By doing so, we hope to inspire more designers to express their creativity and contribute to Shopee’s creative spirit.
Lastly, to ensure we achieve a mutual understanding with local teams, we started conducting regular discussions to get their feedback on how to improve our designs. This would allow us to set a benchmark for quality design and lead it as the regional team. It has only been our first few sessions. Still, we are glad to see that the visual quality of external corporate branding is gradually improving.
Improving Design Efficiency and Consistency with Brand Asset Libraries and Tools
As previously mentioned, there are more than 500 graphic designers in Shopee whose work involves rapidly producing operational graphics to support the business.
What else can we do to ease their work and improve efficiency and consistency?
Apart from brand guidance, we are continuously working on and providing brand asset libraries and tools, like:
1. Shopee Illustration Library
Did you know? A designer spends approximately 3–5 hours researching and designing to produce a single scene.
Illustrating from ground zero without source materials can be time-consuming. Therefore, establishing a system and library can save them time and help them become more efficient.
Shopee Illustration Library provides more than 150 illustration assets, primarily for employer branding scenarios. It is also regularly updated as per the request from teams. Users can easily download the source file and customise the illustration based on their needs.
2. Shopee Icon Library
Shopee Icon Library provides more than 500 of the most frequently used icons to ease designers’ workload. From spending hours conceptualising and creating an entirely new icon, all they need to do now is search, select, and download their desired one.
We also aim to empower all designers to contribute their icons to our library in the coming future. That way, all icons can be shared across countries to save designers’ time recreating the icons.
Conclusion
The Brand Design team’s mission is to balance localisation and branding consistency. It’s a challenging topic, and we are still learning every step of the way. But for now, I’m just glad to hear from designers that our guidelines and libraries are beneficial to their work.
Moving forward, we will continuously provide more effective brand guidance where designers can contribute to the branding image and produce more assets, services or tools. In addition, we hope to further enhance efficiency and empower the local teams to contribute to our libraries.
We look forward to updating you with more exciting projects. So stay tuned!
Shopee is the leading e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia and Taiwan. Shopee connects shoppers, brands and sellers across Asia and other fast-growing markets, empowering anyone to buy and sell anywhere and at any time.
Shopee offers an easy, secure, and engaging experience that is enjoyed by millions of people daily. It offers a wide product assortment, supported by integrated payments and logistics, as well as popular entertainment features tailored for each market. Shopee is also a key contributor to the region’s digital economy with a firm commitment to helping brands and entrepreneurs succeed in e-commerce.
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