Founded in 2000 by Tim Barber, David Bliss and Jacquie Moss, Odopod had earned a reputation for creative excellence and digital innovation over the past 13 years. In 2011, Odopod was acquired by Nurun. Nurun had been held in high esteem all over Canada and Europe, looking to make a strong foothold in America.

It's not often that a company is acquired with no dramatic changes. It's even rarer that a company is acquired and given the privilege to redesign both the identity and web presence of their new parent. This was the case with Odopod transitioning to Nurun, and I was on the team.

The original Nurun website and branding

Building a New Brand

We began by partnering with local branding masters Office to redesign the Nurun logo and create a fresh new visual language. The end result was a beautiful new logotype and mark reminiscent of the original logo and a system of typography, colors, and iconography that could serve as the basis of a new website.

Being Your Own Client

Being an internally led project with stakeholders scattered throughout the globe was a unique challenge. It was clear that Nurun wanted to transition to having a focus on what made Odopod what it was –digital products and services fueled by innovation– but it was certainly a departure from the heavy marketing work that had become their wheelhouse. We spent the first 3 to 4 months creating what we thought was a great site before sharing it out to the larger Nurun team.

We help our clients thrive in a connected world with products, services and platforms that transform the consumer experience.

– Nurun's new mission statement

Luckily for our small design team we were working with the brightest minds in our studio to sell through some of the radical design ideas we had. One particularly unique idea was to show only a small handful of case studies and dive into deep detail and heavy custom graphic production. The following are excerpts from a case study I helped design detailing our involvement with Tesla Motors' retail store touchscreens.

After building out our initial five case studies, we began to see similarities in the stories we were telling. From this, we defined reusable modules for all future case studies. The hope was that future studies would be 80% reused modules and 20% custom.

Finding our Personality

We decided to talk about our values as a company in terms of people we admire rather than a list of abstract themes. We brainstormed for days coming up with lists of people who exemplify our senisbilities in uncommon ways. The page was designed as a journey through these principles for new hires and clients alike.

The new Nurun site launched in June of 2013 to a welcome reception.
Check out the live site here:

We worked with the developers at Nurun's Headquarters in Montreal, Canada to make this site a reality. This wasn't an idea situation - there was both a language gap and communication over time zone differences. This led to a lot of assumptions being made and a pain to really dial in an animation the design team had in their heads.

Don't Repeat Yourself

During design, each page lead with with big bold leading statements. Our copywriters had to find creative ways to not repeat the same information.

Design Systems for Strangers

After the site was live for a year, I hadn't seen a new in-depth case study created. One reason could be due to the lack of down time, but I attribute it to our high hopes of locking down a designer, copywriter and a developer regularly to create new case studies. This is a mistake we swiftly corrected in future projects by creating flexible, yet restrained content management systems for clients and internal projects. No matter how beautiful a system, is it's meaningless if no one can use it!