Apex List

Tag: UX & Design Systems

  • A Copenhagen studio rebranded a Nigerian bank — then the bank’s own team shipped it in a week

    What does a Copenhagen design studio know about Nigerian banking? Enough, it turns out, to fly to Lagos and find out. Barkas, a Copenhagen creative studio, has rebranded Kuda, a Nigerian digital bank, around a central idea called “More Life” — a phrase rooted in Jamaican dancehall culture, carrying a sense of abundance, possibility and wishing someone well.

    The identity is a deliberate break from banking’s usual visual language: a bold, geometric wordmark with KUDA stacked, a custom typeface — Kuda Modena, designed by Erkin Karamemet — set alongside Suisse International, deep purple anchoring personal banking and black giving Kuda Business its own identity, plus a custom Naira symbol that brings a local reference directly into the system. Photography by Rachel Seidu and illustrations by Charles Owen and Adene Muyiwa build out a world of everyday life, with motion design by John Mu’azu. Barkas also designed the website and an app concept.

    The studio’s team travelled from Copenhagen to Lagos to get a feel for the place before designing for it — the art, the architecture, the music, the colours, the pace of everyday life — rather than building an identity for a Nigerian business based on what they thought Nigeria looked like. It is a small detail that decides whether cross-border work is collaboration or guesswork.

    But the rebrand is only half the story, and the second half is the more useful lesson for small teams. Kuda’s own product team, led by product designer and design-system lead Pelumi Abimbola, rebuilt the company’s design system — Kuda Design System 2.0 — to carry the new identity across retail and business banking, web, iOS and Android. By his account, around 80% of the visual updates could be made through the design system, and most of the existing app was reskinned in less than a week. The identity was the launch; the system was what made it real.

    As the Barkas team itself notes, a new identity does not make a product better — it can change how people perceive a business and make it more recognisable, but if the app is frustrating or the service does not deliver, a new wordmark will not fix that. Brand and product have to earn their place independently. For any small team planning a rebrand, Kuda is the case study to copy: budget for the system, not just the launch, and keep the rollout in the hands of the people who live with the product every day.

    Source: Copenhagen Moodboard, “What happens when a Copenhagen design studio meets Nigerian banking?”

  • Dezeen rebuilt its website after 10 years — and chose evolution, not revolution

    Dezeen has redesigned its website for the first time in 10 years. The design publication, which started in 2006 as a basic WordPress blog run from a spare room, worked with creative technology studio Made by On to rebuild both the front and back ends of the site from the ground up — while deliberately keeping the look readers already know.

    “Evolution, not revolution, has been the aim,” the publication’s co-CEOs Benedict Hobson and Wai Shin Li write. The classic typographic treatments dating back to designer Micha Weidmann’s original work remain, joined by new styling formats, splashes of colour to identify different services, varied image sizes and horizontal scrolling sections to break up the vertical feed. Navigation gets a fresh menu, search and filtering system unified across all of Dezeen’s services, which had grown up ad hoc over the years and could feel fragmented.

    Why this matters to independent teams: most small studios and publishers face the same fork Dezeen did. The old site was built on ageing technology that had grown clunky; things broke too often and fixing them was slow and painful. The temptation in that spot is a dramatic relaunch that also throws away the brand equity. Dezeen’s answer was to separate the two jobs: rebuild the machinery completely, change the surface only where it earns its keep.

    Two details are worth stealing. First, performance was treated as an editorial value, not a technical chore: reducing the site’s carbon impact was a stated priority, with heavy work on image optimisation, and hosting moved to infrastructure running on 100-percent-renewable energy. Second, the rebuild brought search and recommendation engines previously run by external services onto Dezeen’s own infrastructure, and the new layouts were engineered to meet current web accessibility standards — unglamorous work that compounds for every reader, every day.

    The new site also makes room for what Dezeen has become: not just a daily news feed but a suite of services, from awards and events guides to a showroom and a jobs board, all now under refreshed brand guidelines from Weidmann. For a small team sitting on a site that “mostly works,” the question this redesign poses is a useful one: what would you rebuild underneath, even if nobody notices the surface?

    Source: Dezeen, “Dezeen launches a richer and more versatile new website” (published October 21, 2026).