Spherical is a German startup working with governmental agencies all around the world.
Client
Challenge
The project's goal is saving the planet from ecological disaster.
Product
IT systems for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions inventory and international reporting.
How to save the planet?
Since May 2017, Spherical's product is helping the UN member states' governments to combat climate change on our planet.
Spherical helps to reduce GHG emissions levels in the atmosphere.
Under UNFCCC - the UN climate change convention, all member states are required to report to the UN on their greenhouse emissions annually. Each country has their own inventory approach, databases and Excel tables. The UN experts are forced to spend more time checking and putting all the information into a single database.
Every year countries submit their data on 20 thousand parameters to the UN, including amendments to the previous years' reports.
Spherical can help the countries collect data from various sources, visualise analytics and prepare their reports to meet the UN standards.
The objective
There were two core challenges we were tasked with overcoming:
1
Development
We have designed and finalized the MVP at the startup's launch stage: logo, brand identity, simple corporate website, and presentation - all the necessary bits to get ready for the essential negotiations at a conference in Marrakesh.
2
Support
UX & UI solutions development, full design support.
Work process
Our collaboration started with a meeting at a conference in Germany. We've we agreed on a partnership there.
It's great to work with a client who is well aware of development process, acts responsibly in all situations and is always ready for a discussion.
This allowed us to effectively work on this project remotely and iteratively. Even four hours time difference wasn't a problem. We shifted the team's schedule to the evening time, so that we could stay in touch and discuss our progress with the client on a daily basis.
Our main task was to design the system interfaces. In the meantime, we worked on the logo, brand identity, website and presentation for the client's trip to the UN conference.
Logo
Working on Spherical logo, we decided to use a sphere as its main element (the name says it all).
And for the text part we've modified letterforms' arrangements of the selected geometric typeface.
As the software is designed to fight climate change, this brought us to the idea of clearwater in motion, cartographic data and biosphere.
Spherical works on developing a complex inventory system. We wanted their logo to also reflect this. So, in the final version we've added square edges into the sphere. Each of them symbolises part of the project.
Brand identity
Based on the logo, we’ve developed the company’s brand identity.
Website
The site is focused on a very narrow, specific audience. Therefore, the goal was to demonstrate the representatives of government agencies and non-profit organisations from around the world the expert knowledge of Spherical founders, to briefly talk about the product and to explain its benefits to the audience.
There wasn't much time left till the conference in Marrakesh, so we've proposed to launch a one-page site instead with minimal but the most important information about the company.
And just like that, for the first time in our history, we've created a fully responsive website in just 27 hours with the efforts of one designer and the help of Webflow. There were no programmers or layout specialists involved.
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In the nearest future, we will add expert articles and more product information to the website, and will put the finishing touches to it in terms of UX and design.
Software
At the same time, we worked on the style and screens interface for Spherical Inventory Compiler and National Inventory System programs. We also designed an icon for Spherical Inventory Compiler app in the form of a sphere refracting the rays.
Presentation
We developed a presentation for spherical inventory compiler program, with which Mikhail Vartanyan spoke at the UN conference in November 2016.
Results
We helped Spherical to launch their project - it now has its own “face”: the logo, brand identity, the website, and presentations.
Basic version of the site was developed in an unconventional way, allowing us to reduce project’s timeframe to just 27 hours.
Mikhail Vartanyan
Director at Spherical
JetStyle people are awesome. They are super-motivated and bright-eyed - from developers and designers and all the way to the legal department! It was easy and pleasant to work with them. They readily shared their expertise, were attentive to myrequirements, absorbed new information and steered course of action to our needs. Their designers are real wizards: I am still amazed with how they handled the task to create an icon for “Livestock Database”. How on Earth do you draw it?? - and they just did! The presentation slides from JetStyle were a smashing success when we presented them to delegates from all over the world in an international climate change conference. All of them asked to send them the slides - and I have a feeling that it wasn't just about content, people also wanted to bring home some of JetStyle's art as well!
