Wealth, defined

At Urbian, I was responsible for developing a cohesive digital brand system for Sanlam Private Wealth. This involved extracting and systematising every UI element — from components and patterns to atomic design elements — from their new website, and digitising their existing brand book into a unified, democratic reference point for the organisation. The goal was to ensure consistency across all digital and physical touchpoints in order to harmonise both legacy and new brand executions and applications.

The resulting responsive brand portal, built using Frontify.com for future-proofing, governed everything from UI theming and interactive components to brand applications and executions. It also included a comprehensive, shareable illustration and image library that ensured consistent visual storytelling across all digital platforms.

As part of developing the digital brand ecosystem, theming became a central design consideration. Embedded in Sanlam Private Wealth’s brand code was the need for continuous evolution — the ability to refresh the extended colour palette, commissioned illustrations and assets from new artists to express their ongoing commitment to craft.

The challenge lay in finding the intersection between physical craftsmanship and digital experience — determining where and how these refreshed themes could be applied without introducing UI inconsistencies, user confusion or unnecessary development complexity.

The final stage of the process, after standardising and building the system within Frontify, was to apply and test it across the newly redesigned website. This served as both a live stress test for components and patterns, and an opportunity to resolve existing inconsistencies — ensuring the entire digital environment reflected the precision and cohesion of this new approach.

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