Elisa is Finland’s leading telecommunications company and digital services provider, with a business that is also strongly international.
Objective
By 2020, Elisa’s 2015 brand renewal had become outdated: the static PDF-based guidelines no longer reflected the brand’s evolution or the needs of a modern, fast-moving organization. I initiated and led the effort to transition from static documentation to a living, always-up-to-date online brand guideline.
In addition to overseeing the project, I also acted as the art director. Together with our consulting partner, I ensured visual consistency, coherence across touchpoints, and strict alignment with Elisa’s brand identity. The project also included updating and refining the brand’s visual expression to better reflect how it had organically evolved over the years.
My role involved shaping the visual direction, validating design decisions, and ensuring that the renewed guidelines strengthened both the brand’s clarity and its long-term value.
Guidelines & outcome
The documentation was built on the same Zeroheight platform used for the Design System, a strategic choice aimed at bridging the gap between brand documentation and design system documentation. This integration helped bring marketing and product development closer together, increasing collaboration and shared understanding between the teams designing and building Elisa’s products and services.
The documentation project succeeded, and collaboration between marketing and product development has since become more seamless. The previously fragmented illustration style is now unified, and the brand guideline is strongly linked to the design system documentation. The guideline is also publicly available, just like the design system itself, greatly improving how Elisa’s visual identity is communicated to stakeholders and external partners.
