The Challenge 

Students were challenged to create a consistent visual identity and digital experience as part of a wider branding and messaging strategy for digital startup gliff.ai. 

gliff.ai is a new enterprise that wants to create high-quality and easy-to-use productivity tools for artificially intelligent imaging. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science that aims to build machines and programs that perform tasks normally associated with human intelligence. The gliff.ai team is dedicated to making AI achievable in any domain: biomedical, environmental or industrial. Their current focus is on the analysis of biomedical images such as X-ray, CT, MRI or Microscopy, however, they want to expand into our business sectors too. 

gliff.ai has an ambitious business agenda and diverse range of stakeholders to satisfy who include end users, fellow software developers and investors. Each stakeholder group needs to understand its message, what it offers to them, and buy into gliff.ai’s core brand values….

The Ask

Working with gliff.ai’s consultant Creative Director Lucy Batley and gliff.ai’s own technical team, nine students explored the branding, visual identity and communication of gliff.ai and related UX/UI design for its software product/s.

They were expected to attempt both the branding and UX/UI design, but could choose to focus their attention on one of the two challenges. 

Background

gliff.ai is a 2018 spin-out from Durham University (UK) and is founded on world-class research into biomedical image analysis. gliff.ai will be launching their latest AI productivity tools for public sale in 2021.

gliff.ai initially focused on building a medical product that analyses biomedical images such as X-ray, CT, MRI or Microscopy. However, UK regulations around the developer of medical software make getting AI products like gliff.ai’s a long and difficult process. Therefore gliff.ai has diversified into creating a software platform and a set of tools for AI imaging that are ‘open source’ and can be developed and added to by other developers for use in different business sectors. A good example of this is WordPress, which is a very popular open source content management system for creating websites, where lots of independent software developers create plug-ins and themes for other developers and designers to use to create websites. gliff.ai’s goal is to have a suite of productivity tools for AI that they will release using the Commercial Open Source Software (COSS) business model.

The Deliverables

• A branding & UX/UI presentation explaining your conceptual solution with examples of how it is used across an appropriate set of digital and physical touchpoints. The presentation should also include a visual walkthrough of the user interface design. 

• A set of simple brand guidelines in a relevant format.

• A digital library of UX patterns and UI components.

The Results

Students created a range of varied branding and UX/UI solutions for the team at Gliff.ai to consider. Two of the students were asked for interviews with part-time work on other during the rest of their programme. Josh Smith was successful in gaining this opportunity has since taken up a full-time role with Gliff as their UX/UI Designer.