— Morgan Stanley Capital Investments
The baseline for investing

Coming into a team where design has never really been considered, is in itself huge challenge. Our responsibility was wide ranging – from helping define the brand direction to building a cohesive product offering that built upon Morgan Stanley’s reputation without jeopardising it’s meaning to it’s incumbants.

As the second hire to the team, I had the utter privelage to work in the design team under the guidance of the brilliant Rute Robalo. She remains a great inspiration of mine, and much of my design-self has been shaped by her wisdom and knowledge.

Acting as an internal agency, myself and Rute, scaled up the design team from 0 to 12. I was also fortunate to take over leadership of the team when Rute left for maternity (she had twins!).

Creating a new identity without jeopardising the original vision is a tough nut to crack, however, working with the amazing Olson design agency (now ICF Next) – we found the balance.

Research, research, research. Understanding our market position as well as where stakeholders wanted us to be, drove much of our decision making. Our brand-led approach allowed us to focus on the expectations of our users – rather than rewriting the rules giving  us, quite frankly, amazing insight into where our products needed to be...and where they could go.

Building the vision is one thing, putting it together is quite another. Design had a huge responsibility to pull all the pieces that our brand affected together and plan the roll–out over a 1,5 year span.

We scaled rapidly, building a trusted team of freelancers alongside  our growing base team to cover all eventualities. Staying ahead and planning the design strategy was at the core of our decisions.

MSCI relies on customers having a consistent, and reliable experience. Our remit was to level–up our brand and design style without disrupting that. We needed to provide our customers with a better visual experience without affecting the user experience.

We consulted with tech to help them define the UI system that Morgan Stanley’s products were based on. Building accessibility as well as ensuring that our system is future–proof were our guiding principles.