Erlang Sea

 

I helped entrepreneur Sahra Mackley establish a UI system for her customer support optimization business.

Overview: Sahra’s focus is wanted her brand to convey an aquatic metaphor: order coming from chaos as many individuals come together, as seen in swarms of fish. I created a UI system and animated illustrations to bring this to life.

My role: UI designer, illustrator, animator

Context: This was a client project through Art + Story LLC.

Tools: Figma, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe After Effects, LottieFiles, Squarespace


Erlang Sea Brand Personality

Brand Personality

To dig into the personality Erlang Sea is meant to convey, I set up a set of sliders with opposing traits. Then on a Zoom call with Sahra, we discussed where she saw her brand on a scale of one through five for each item. This gave me an idea of where to start — the brand is strongly organic and bold.

Mood Board

Once I understood Sahra’s vision for Erlang Sea’s personality, and the crucial metaphor about fish swarming together, I created a moodboard of illustrations to make sure we were on the same page. I focused on bold oceanic shades of blue and organic shapes. The illustration on the top right of the board brings in the idea of “complexity.”

 

Colors

Main Palette

The “Sea Glass” palette reflects Erlang Sea’s ocean theme. The cool colors create the effect of translucent sea glass or ripples across water. There are enough contrasting options to make words clear and accessible, but also enough analogous colors to create subtle side-by-side transitions. When paired with ocean images these colors are peaceful and approachable, but also serious enough to be trustworthy.

Erlang Sea’s primary blue

This color is a true oceanic blue. It is both vibrant and dependable, and it looks great with each of the other colors. It has more yellow in it than the typical bright blues of the internet (twitter, Facebook, etc) and therefore is set apart. For text, it works best against Gull (white) or Surf (the light shade.) For graphic elements such as icons, it is also attractive with the middle range colors.

Color variations and uses

I made sure that the colors are compliant with each other, look beautiful in gradients, and include tints to add depth to illustrations.