A new digital dawn for Sammen

Jan 16, 2024

The Student Welfare Organization Sammen provides services at various study locations throughout the West Coast of Norway.
These services include student housing, fitness centers, cafeteria operations, and a range of welfare services. Sammen needed to consolidate all its services into a unified platform for 45,000 students.

Sammen manages around 6,000 housing units, has 20,000 members across 10 fitness centers, operates over 40 dining establishments, and serves more than 45,000 users.

Their challenge was the highly fragmented nature of their solutions for students, with one system for fitness, one for housing, and five variations of websites – one for each location. Students struggled to find the information they needed, having to navigate different systems for various aspects of Sammen’s service offerings.

Challenge

Sammen is the student welfare organization for the entire West Coast and serves nearly 45,000 students, offering a wide range of services across multiple locations. However, the systems are minimally synchronized, and users of different services must navigate between several external platforms and third-party solutions to manage housing, fitness, food, courses, and many other services. The service offerings vary between districts, making it challenging to present accurate information to the right user. The websites are difficult to keep track of, leading to duplicate content, exacerbating the problem. Lack of information among students has resulted in an increasing volume of inquiries and questions that Sammen must address.

Solution

The project was established with three parallel tracks:

One track aimed to improve collaboration across locations and cities within the organization. This involved implementing virtual teams and introducing a new case management system to empower employees for enhanced user service.
Another track focused on system architecture, building an intermediary layer for all services in the cloud. This allowed for a unified login for all services, maintaining control over the data, and enabling control over how the services are exposed.
The third track concentrated on information architecture. Based on user insights, a new structure and design were developed for all service areas, designed for continuous evolution with new features and led by a core team within the organization.

All tracks are managed through a common digital roadmap prioritized based on user insights, technological possibilities, and strategic priorities.

Result

The result is an entirely new website with the scope reduced from over 3,000 to approximately 250 pages. Simultaneously, Sammen also established a unified contact point for its services across locations, providing customer support with a significant boost.

Time will tell if we reached our KPIs!

88% av alle henvendelser er nå løst innen én dag, og lanseringen gikk smertefritt — på tid og budsjett!

Geir Nesse
IT-sjef, Sammen

Jacob lagde kreative og innsiktsfulle konsepter som virkelig tok brukerne på alvor.
Vi er SÅ fornøyde med de nye nettsidene våre!

Marita Monsen
Kommunikasjonsdirektør, Sammen

Project Leads
Martin Claussen og Torstein Utne

Service and User Experience Design
Jacob Lysgaard &
Ingfrid Daland Næss

Development
Øyvind Øyen,
Nicholas Mowatt,
Espen Eika

ScaleAQ Brand Development & Website

Aug 28, 2020

ScaleAQ brand development & Website

In the wake of the merger of Steinsvik, AquaLine, and AquaOptima, ScaleAQ has emerged as the world’s largest services and equipment supplier to the aquaculture sector.

As part of the team at AG& I was lead designer on the project. With a core visual identity already in place, our job was to further develop this into a design language for web and many other mediums. With my background we were also able to develop and produce their podcast — to codify the brand, drive the internal sense of ownership, and stake out a course as market leader in the industry.

The website has to serve many functions for many different customer groups, not to mention five languages — which presented some interesting challenges to create new intuitive UI concepts.

Simula UiB Identity & Website

Nov 29, 2018

Simula UiB Visual Identity & Website

The website was a big part of this project, so you might want to check it out right away!

SEE THE WEBSITE

Simula UiB is a research center owned by Simula Research Laboratory and the University of Bergen, specialising in cryptography and information theory.

Let’s take you through our process from the start:

We started by defining the different fields of study Simula UiB specialise in, and creating a language of symbols to give these otherwise intangible concepts some visual cohesion. Each course is represented by a hex and is given its own symbol.

dat103

Computers and Operating Systems
HVL

inf142

Computer Networks

UiB

inf143

Security in Distributed Systems
UiB

inf144

Information Theory

UiB

To bring all the parts together into a whole, we gather the hexes in a unified shape, to act as the top-level emblem.

This also roughly symbolises their two main fields of expertise: Collection of data, and the selective showing of data.

We then played around with these shapes to create various properties like patterns and background elements.

Our goal was to create a typography-driven website that would be serious without being somber. Something that communicates clearly, but never without some sparkle in its eyes. Go check it out!

SEE THE WEBSITE

In this process we were lucky enough to build the website and the visual identity in parallell — this unorthodox way of working lets us be very agile and continually test out ideas for what works and what doesen’t.

If you have a great idea for the identity, you quickly get to stress-test it when you implement it, and observe what happens when it is viewed on an old phone or in low-earth orbit.

Thanks for watching! Be sure to let us know if you want to discuss a project or talk about the weather.

<3 Jacob

Apache identity & website

Mar 1, 2018

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.

Apache is a startup team of writers specialising in content marketing. We developed their identity and website, starting at the core of what they do — stories.

more leads than with traditional ads

of the cost compared to traditional ads

times the conversion rate compared to traditional ads

Historier.

From the absurdly heaviest of headlines to paragraphs chiseled by nanomachines

When all the designer-speak boils away, we have to let the actual product shine through — and in this case, that’s mostly text. And when you write all sorts of things for all sorts of clients, that text needs to look equally good as ad copy for a toy magazine, as an in-depth article into the wonders of Sous Vide cooking.

Our type system is based on the combination of the modern and gutsy Integral, with the understated, timeless, great-in-every-size Garamond. We picked the EB cut, as this is optimized for legibility on modern screens, and is served up nice and fast from Google’s own font library. We dare you to find a situation that cannot be served by this power couple.

Website

The website is fully responsive and adapts its content to fit different use cases. Wowing visitors with fancy animations is far from enough to convert new customers, as both we and Apache knows well. So we show some core numbers that make the added value of their services fairly obvious and showcase their biggest selling points, such as their efficiency and no-BS attitude. For those willing to dig deeper we have an archive of past work to look at, and punctuate the experience by clear calls-to-action urging visitors to get in touch.

Visit the website

A moving brand: Nabovarsel

Sep 29, 2013

Nabovarsel

IDENTITY

Lots of weird sketch processes with this project! Nabovarsel has a pretty complex theoretical and philosophical backbone to everything they do, so translating all this into a unified identity can be, well, daunting. Instead of simply showing you the finished product, let’s instead go through the process from the start, and look at both the good and the bad ideas. Nabovarsel is a collective of people working within electronic music and art in Bergen, Norway. Record label, music and art collective, Nabovarsel have claimed many titles over the years, but most people know us from our consistently award-winning and butt-moving club night at Landmark, which ended its 6-year stint in 2015. The first brief centred around the desire to mirror a true side of the city, as well as convey their non-conformity, counter-culture, Do-it-yourself-mentality and electronic music and art values, while at the same time feeling like an institution, something everlasting but always changing, mock-official, punk-bank-like. My first sketches ended up in this idea about merging the people, symbolised by the houses, and the city, symbolised by the mountain. Ultimately a dead end though. Let’s have a look:

The houses

The mountains

I got this idea for a pretty far out N symbol after workshopping some ideas with Erik “Teipu” Stokkmo. The N can split up, and become both the N and the V for the logotype. Begging to be animated!

Then, in a sketching session with Knut Harald Longva, this concept emerged; bulding the N shape from a disrupted circle. Which works great on a number of conceptual levels.

But despite being a lot of fun, in beta testing we quickly found out it had some problems. Including the entire wordmark inside the emblem, as well as the rather thin outer rim made legibility a problem in small sizes. Back to the drawing board:

Iteration

After some preliminary test usage, we concluded with the following changes:

Consolidate the “full circle” version and the simple “N” version into a more unified form, usable in any size and media
Solidify the form to be more robust, as the hairline of the current version is to frail
Enable a more unified typography, with clear distinctions and more consistent usage rules

With this version, the N and the circle share the same width, making it sturdy as a rock. Then on to find a unified typographic style. The first version used Code bold in the logotype and Archer in additional text, neither of which really brought home the bacon. After a series of type tests and printing, I landed on Neutra as our head typeface, a classy cut that strikes just the right balance between strict and sassy. It also works beautifully in all sizes, in Demi for display heights, and Book for full paragraphs. Neutra also employs some really nifty ink traps, which come in handy when printing posters. As you can see, the N and V is also altered to adhere to the 37° cut and unify it with the emblem. (A brand update in 2015 included the use of Space Mono as a main screen-type workhorse). If you wanna see how the system looks in real life, check out the case study on all the posters I’ve made.