Ramp

Bridging the gap between product and brand

From small start-ups to industry leaders, for years, companies of all sizes have been using Ramp's tools to make their financial management easier and simpler. Ramp products help automate repetitive tasks such as invoice scanning and simplify complex activities such as tracking income, expenditures and reimbursements, making life easier for accounting teams in any business. Over the years, Ramp has grown quickly from a spending and reimbursement card to offering a wide range of more sophisticated products and services.

For several months, we've been working with both product and brand teams from Ramp, aligning their needs to develop a consistent visual system that can communicate the features and benefits their products offer most effectively. This included creating a set of 'product graphic' assets that would display the ease of using their tools and help unpack the different workflows of their products.

With such rapid growth, a gap emerged between the size and complexity of their offer and the communication strategy they had developed to discuss it. Our job was to help bridge this gap.

Exploration and collaboration

We began this process with weeks of immersion with Ramp, getting to understand the brief, the specific challenges and the needs of the client in granular detail. This was crucial for the relationship for the next six months because this initial deep dive allowed us to gain an understanding of the product that was necessary to develop a comprehensive communication system for Ramp.

During this time, speaking to both the product and brand teams, we were able to work through any assumptions and redefine aspects of the brief. Here, we identified some inconsistencies within the existing brand language and how the current approach could have communicated more complex workflows in a more digestible way.

This led us to step back and revisit things holistically, thinking about how we could create a product graphic system that would work for the current content whilst being scalable to allow it to grow in the future.

Levels of abstraction: making the invisible understandable

Because so much of Ramp's technology operates behind the scenes, with complex financial operations working invisibly, we needed to find a way to communicate what's happening within workflows quickly and easily. Visualising these usually unseen workflows was a core part of our work, with the challenge being to make these processes simple to understand so visitors to the website could quickly grasp them. In addition to explaining the bigger picture of how the tools worked, we also needed to demonstrate the features of these tools and how they look and operate. This involved trying to find ways to show elements of the products' user interface in an instantly graspable way.

Our early explorations involved experimenting with different levels of abstraction to solve this and figure out what the product graphics should look like. We first tried very abstract graphics, which turned out to be overly simplistic and unable to tell a sufficient story. Then, we experimented with much more detailed product graphics that felt far closer to the real UI of the product, but these often felt too cumbersome. During this process, we gained insights that helped us to begin to define the exact set of product graphics that we would ultimately deliver.

Collaborators

• Tbd (cgi artist)
• Tbd (motion)