International Living
Discover Your Place in the World
Architecting a seamless digital brand experience for one of the world’s leading overseas living advisors.
With an estimated 9 million Americans living overseas, International Living needed a refreshed brand identity and digital strategy to future-proof and position itself for success.
The Challenge
As the leading, must-have resource for people looking to invest, retire and live abroad and with a growing audience of expat-enthusiasts and a sky-rocketing appetite for digital services, a conscious choice was made for International Living to go fully digital and evolve from a subscription-based magazine to a membership-oriented digital platform.
With this move, International Living needed a revitalised identity to carry them forward for the future. We were tasked with creating a new positioning, proposition, brand identity and digital experience that embodied their future-bound and effortless approach to overseas living and achieved three key objectives.
1. Enhance International Living’s brand recognition solidifying it’s reputation as a trusted, value-maximising brand designed around members’ needs.
2. Create a seamless, unified and personalised user experience reflective of the value brought to members.
3. Nurture an active community of strong brand advocates through engaging experiences and interactive tools.
The Solution
From our research, we defined three experience principles that would flow through every element of the new brand, from tone of voice to the brand’s visual identity.
1. Simplicity
2. Relevancy
3. Reality
With these three experience principles in mind, we began crafting a proposition that framed the prospect of international living in a relevant, inspiring, and personalised way for audiences.
Inspired by high-end editorial publications the new masthead has been designed to reflect International Living’s high-quality content and proven experience.
To bring the brand to life, we set about designing a distinct visual and verbal identity that embodied their quality-driven, user-centric, and expert offering.
Creating the digital experience
To define a successful new digital experience for members, we first mapped all the existing content on the existing platforms against a selection of user personas based on real members. These were mapped against their associated user journeys to discover how users navigate the platform, what their needs are and how we could better serve them.
We mapped out all of the content, developing a singular information architecture that would work seamlessly for all users. From there we designed a seamless digital platform for members with engaging and interactive experiences.
“Over the years we have worked with a lot of agencies. RichardsDee have been the only ones to gain an incredible understanding of our complex business and to completely capture what we were looking for (including what we didn’t know we needed). I loved every interaction with the team. Their passion and creatively is infectious.
As a company we’re thrilled with the outcome. They delivered something more than we could have hoped for, something we’re beyond proud of. I look forward to working with the team at RichardsDee on more projects in the future.”
Lynn Ferrari, Director of Digital Experience, International Living