OctoFinance

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  Octofinance Logo and Slogan

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  Personas

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  Product Goals

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  Design Principles

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  Multilingual Website

Inspiration

We were inspired by our own immigrant parents, as well as anecdotal experience regarding financial knowledge among women and minorities. With this, we created a website that reflected our passion for empowering minorities using our strengths as graphic designers.

What it does

OctoFinance is a prototype of a financial education website that focuses on the financial literacy of minorities, including marginalized people and women, as they statistically tend to have lower knowledge about topics surrounding money compared to men. We also aim to appeal and make financial literacy more accessible and less intimidating as there is a market for less “cold” or “corporate” designs when it comes to displaying information.

This also caters to a less male or wider class audience that the stereotypical brand identity usually aims for with more rigid and stereotypically “intellectual male” “style” with serif fonts or colours such as yellow or blue. Our design aims to break this mold and at the same time, empower people who feel like there are barriers or are unable to access material. We aim to ultimately provide an option that subverts the male centric perceptions that society places on subjects such as finances.

How we built it

In our design process, we started by analyzing competitors in the market such as Investopedia and TD Bank. First, we decided on the type of information and content we needed in order to bring a fresh perspective to finance. A strong focus on cultural and societal factors that cause financial stress, looking at individual circumstances and making learning more accessible were key points that would differentiate our website in the marketplace. Using market research, we created personas of various backgrounds and financial situations, and designed our website with their pain points in mind. After finalizing our design, we created a prototype with our own illustrations and logo for a strong brand identity to go with this fresh take on financial information websites.

Challenges we ran into

As an entire team of first year graphic design students, we had many logistical challenges such as becoming comfortable with going through the design process as a group as well as making a fully fleshed out business and web proposition. We also had to decide on our brand identity and direction for the website, which required a fusion of typography and custom illustration.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to finish another hackathon as first year students, becoming more comfortable with creating prototypes and group work in a high stress environment.

What we learned

How to time manage better and plan as a group, as well as what it is like to prototype with a team of designers with a variety of expertise in art and design

What's next for OctoFinance

When we learn how to code, we would like to fully flesh out the website with both backend and frontend code.

Built With

• adobe-xd
• figma