Exploration
Nomad Typography Audit
Story
Background:
Nomad Health is an online marketplace that directly connects physicians, nurses, and medical facilities for healthcare jobs, without the involvement of third party employment agencies. After 6 years, the company still struggles to establish a strong brand identity to separate itself from other competitors including Trusted and Aya. Due to the lack of brand foundation, it is necessary to audit the brand’s visual language to provide a cohesive visual experience across all Nomad products and marketing channels. The first area we needed to focus on was typography.
Challenge #1:
- Nomad’s visual language had no consistency within its products. The voices—type, colors, composition, etc.—among the experiences are not the same.
- Nomad didn’t know what its future voice would be. Hence, without a clear direction, it would be very easy to get lost in the auditing process.
- Nomad needed to know its future brand voice in order to reflect it successfully in the products so that the Nomad experiences stay cohesive throughout the whole experience both in product and out to marketing.
Challenge #2:
- This execution covered multiple products and spanned out across multiple quarters.
- The Nomad team needed to know the ownership of each stage, resources, plan ahead, timeline...
Roles
Sole designer
- Audited typography across all marketing channels and Nomad’s products (desktop web, mobile web, and native app)
- Made a comprehensive list of all type families and fonts that were being used across all the experiences. This 1-month process returned with a completed list of 79 fonts being used everywhere.
- Condensed the list of 79 fonts down to a recommended list of 18 fonts for desktop and a recommended list of 18 fonts for mobile.
- Tested the recommended lists across all the experiences to prevent any design defects and experience hiccups.
- Implemented the new typography into the Design System and published the type library for product designers’ usage.
Recognition
Process
The Nomad brand audit
As a stepping stone for an identity revamp, this document covers the main talking points of the brand audit including the current state of the Nomad identity, the challenges the brand is facing, the proposed timeline, as well as possible request for future resources from other teams.
A closer look at typography
This stage focused on identifying all the fonts that are being used across all experiences (desktop web, marketing channels, etc.). Each experience, each page is screen-shot. Identified fonts are recorded in this Figjam document.
Here are some notable examples.
On-boarding
Job Discover
Job Details
Application
A typography cleanup
This stage focused on pulling all the audited fonts into one single spread. Afterwards, fonts will be grouped based on their locations on the layout and functionality on their respective pages. The final step of this stage was to chose a single font that could represent and replace the fonts in each group. The final result of this stage is a new condensed/comprehensive 17-font list that will be tested across all experiences to ensure performance perfection.
Warning: long post ahead.
A typography test
The new fonts are utilized across multiple experiences for performance-perfection. The fonts are changed/modified in sandbox environment to make sure that the final selections work with all experiences.
This stage results in 2 final fonts sets that work for both Mobile and Desktop. The final typography is brought into the design system and published for product designers’ usage.
A fresh look
The new type has been officially used by the Nomad Design team. The fresh look is slowly taking over the Nomad experience.
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The new search experience with updated typography
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