About this project

LIQID didn't have a brand manual yet. I was working there as a student and turned that into my bachelor thesis, Designing Customer Experiences. Through a lot of reading and long conversations with industry experts, I kept coming back to the same point: you can't hold a customer experience together across every touchpoint without a shared set of guidelines. The thesis makes that case, and then builds the thing itself.

The research

The groundwork was primary research: weeks of reading and five long interviews with industry experts, including a product designer at Zalando, the marketing director of Central Europe at Adobe and the head of design & brand strategy at Deutsche Telekom. When an answer felt too comfortable, I kept pushing, and that's where most of the useful material came from.

Who it was for

The research turned into three personas, one per LIQID product line: The Cautious, The Risk-Taker and The Expert. Each came with a full customer journey, mapped stage by stage: what the person is thinking at each point, and how LIQID should answer. Everything after this was built for those three.

The system

The second half is the brand manual itself. Logo and clear-space rules, a typographic system with clear roles, a colour system worked out down to CMYK and Pantone and mapped to each product, iconography, and two separate image worlds, one for the product and one for employer branding, each with its own contrast logic. From there it runs through illustration, video, merchandise, web, print and social, with an early dark-mode concept on top. I wrote all of it so colleagues could work from it day to day. 105 pages, bound as a book.

The outcome

The design team took it on as LIQID's first brand manual. It became the base I kept building on, through the 2024 refresh and the 2026 rebrand. Five years of work on one brand, all of it starting here.