The Ninja Van design blog is a passion project initiated by myself to encourage designers in the team to share knowledge and learnings on design topics, as well as success stories of their work within and outside of the design team. One of my core beliefs as a designer is to proactively share UX design practice to non-designers. This initiative is thus an avenue to introduce the rest of the tech and business teams to our design process, projects, and UX in general.
The first version of the design blog is hosted on Notion as it is easy to format using templates, well-organised using databases, and readable for the audience. These features of Notion fits our initial criteria and use cases for the design blog.
I am the main IC from planning to executing this design blog. My contribution includes choosing the medium to host the blog, setting a design direction and designing the icons, rallying designers to contribute articles, and promoting the blog to the wider organisation.
For the blog to be purposeful, I ran a survey with our designers and product managers to gather insights on the content consumption behaviours and topics of interest. This also helped our first batch of article contributors to craft their articles to match the interest of the audience.
I was also inspired by other world-class design teams e.g. Spotify design and Google design, which maintains a public site that showcases the design team's culture and work externally to attract top design talents.
When setting the design direction, I wanted the design blog to be a fun and casual place for us to be creative, but also not steer too far away from existing Ninja Van branding (mascot, brand colours). Inspired by Japanese magazines and comics, the overall design illustration style follows a Japanese clean line style inspired by Noritake’s drawings.
With the art theme in mind, I crafted a series of icons to represent each of the different topics in the design blog.
For the banners, I also illustrated Ninja Van’s mascot, Ryo, in the same style.
After the initial set-up of the design blog, I also headed the promotion of the design blog to the rest of the organisation and ensuring that there was a continuous effort in contributing new articles to the design blog. Each of the articles garnered an average of 100 unique views within the month of publishing, showing an overwhelming interest from the rest of the organisation.
