Accounts Overview - Bank of America

Visual Designer

Overview & goals

As one of two visual designers, we collaborated to redesign the Accounts Overview experience — the most viewed section of the website, which had been using the same design for over ten years. The primary goal was to convert the outdated design into a refreshing and exciting experience using Bank of America’s new brand guidelines.

Challenges

Collaborating with another designer to combine our concepts was not something I was used to. It was difficult piecing our designs together while not stepping on each other’s toes and compromising the visuals. In addition, the brand team was very nit-picky about staying within their guidelines. At the same time the brand itself was not yet finalized and kept evolving during our design phases.

Understanding the brand

Bank of America was going through their company rebrand during the time of this project. It was one of the first to use the new guidelines. We were in lots of meetings with the brand team to really understand and immerse ourselves in the latest look and feel. There were lots of rules, do’s and don’ts, balance of components and every other guideline there was to be had. It was very overwhelming at first, but after reading through the documentation and examples they provided, I became more comfortable designing with it in mind.

Along with all the documentation were tons of assets to sift through and quickly become familiar with. We needed to know the specific font sizes for section headers, body copy, labels and captions; the correct colors to use with primary, secondary and tertiary palettes; and the right amount of imagery to use and whether it should be an illustration or photo. These were just a few of the guidelines which eventually became second nature to me. 

Visual collaboration

As one of two visual designers, we had to present a single concept to our stakeholders which would not only become the future design for one of the most viewed pages on Bank of America’s website, but also pave the way for future visuals on subsequent pages.

Not having worked with the other designer before, we agreed it would be best if each of us designed different visual concepts to understand the other’s strengths. We reviewed and iterated with the help of our project lead to push each other’s designs further. What we found was that we both had similar styles. We both preferred clean, airy, minimal layouts. The few differences being that I included more gradients, shadows and depth, while she had more clean lines and flat colors.