Having a digital-first brand is crucial for companies that constantly dialogue with millions of customers all around the world. That means to offer flawless experiences to several kinds of people, no matter the platform, integrating them into the UX Design. At the end, it’s all about creating a recognizable narrative, made by elements that are easily adaptable to different touchpoints. This is what Enel Group asked us, and we translated this request into the challenge of providing them an evolution of the brand through an accessible, consistent and effective visual language.

In recent years, communication has increasingly shifted from products to values, from functional to emotional reasons in choosing a company, from marketing to branding. From a good brand derives the elements and the rules that remind the different stakeholders—both internal and external—what the company is and what it is capable of doing. From good corporate communication, in essence, good products are born. Communicating a brand, as a consequence, means communicating a vision. We gave shape to Enel’s vision—based on sustainability, innovation, and openness—creating a renewed visual language and putting all this at the center of a digital-first brand. The requirement that dictated most of our choices was designing a website that meets the highest accessibility standards (AA certification). A major challenge for the team of designers in charge of the project, since they had to give up many solutions that did not meet this requirement. The result is a simplified interface, which delegates adherence to the brand identity mainly to the content, rather than to its graphic features. Enel.com takes on the appearance of an editorial platform, a sort of “corporate magazine” in which it is extremely easy to find and use information. The new digital communication platform is the lighthouse that guides strategic decisions, the development of products and services, the relationships with employees, talents, journalists, investors, partners, and innovation communities for the entire Enel Group. To match the group’s efficiency, speed, and consistency, we provided them with a real Design System: a set of rules, assets, components, and modules to create any digital platform. The search for flexibility made us aware of the need to design a set of guidelines and tools that would gradually apply to all the touchpoints of Enel’s digital ecosystem. A complex and articulated repository, available to the employees and its collaborators, the combination of which gives rise to variable structures and architectures, capable of changing to accommodate the internal and external changes to the corporate context. To date, this design system is applied within Enel.com, but has also had its hand in the creation—in record time—of various portals like the new endesa.com, enelnorthamerica.com, and the platform dedicated to Global Procurement—to name a few. All this repositions Enel as a design-oriented company that creates innovation by investigating people's needs (human-centered design) and continuously improving its own priorities and values (brand-centered design) while paying close attention to their community and the environment (society-centered design).