DORSIA
Revolutionizing hospitality with dorsia:
Building out the first official brand identity guide, and creating alignment in digital content and product development.
Overview
Dorsia is a $35M-backed hospitality tech startup that offers members access to impossible reservations, tables, and invite-only cultural moments around the globe - from Michelin Star restaurants, to Coachella afters, to the US Open. Our members appreciate elevated service, access on demand, and the ability to book, pay, and invite guests directly from their phones.
Brief
Build out an ownable brand identity.
Create foundational digital content - social templates, email campaigns, investor decks, internal resources, and the Dorsia App.
Help brainstorm and pitch creative projects - manifested into partnership with US Open and Dobel Tequila.
Tools
Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator, Framer, Braze, Notion, Slack, In-House Developer App (ROAM)
Timeline
May - Sep 2024
Location
Miami and remote
Team/Partners
Senior Designers, Creative Director, Product Engineers, Growth Marketing Team, Copywriters, CEO, President.
Impact
60K+ users in 12 global markets
Brand identity/guide
Interactive design
Product development
Graphic design
Content strategy
Liasoning with sponsorship
Stakeholder workshop
Influencer marketing program
HOW I ADDED VALUE
Brand Identity
Brand is everything at Dorsia. I joined this team as an in-house designer to hone what that looks like. My team includes: Jenny Liu Zhang, design lead, Husein Esufally, designer, Mitchell Hart, designer, Pat White, designer, Nate Storey, editorial lead/creative director, Abby Saldana, editor. After 4 months of working together, and thousands of multi-platform assets created, this is what we came to.
With a team of six-ish, we developed the Dorsia brand identity. Coining our own “Bento Box” design aesthetic, the Dorsia identity is something ownable and niche to our brand. Two years in the making, I jumped in and helped reach the finish mark and in ten weeks. My senior designer, Jenny, developed the Dorsia Style Guide, a 100 slide framework that outlines our ownable, niche, visual strategy; story (B2C and B2B narratives); brand voice; and how to apply this consistently across platforms and channels.
This deck was produced by Jenny Zhang.
The Dorsia Style Guide
The early framework and starting point we built and launched off to translate the visual identity into the overall brand concept which included story, voice, visual, in practice, and everything in between.
Dorsia Basic Design System
At some point, we decided that incoporating our own hand-designed illustrations into our external and internal marketing assets like newsletters, market launches, social media posts, would give the brand a touch of artistry, playfulness, and an identifiable niche in the visual identity.
I built out this illustration library that you can see incoporated in everything from our newsletters (The Weekend Edit) to Investor decks, to hiring posters, to Instagram posts.
Dorsia Illustration Library
Whenever Dorsia aquires a new restaurant as a partner, we need to formally announce the “venue launch” to drive sales, promote exposure to new venues, and maximize engagement on the app.
We applied this new “illustration concept” and visual identity to a venue launch and created a consistent treatment across our main social channel Instagram, email campaigns, in app pop-ups, etc.
Below is an example of a few kinds of assets we created for our launch of Elephante Los Angeles, implementing our new illlustration strategy.
Venue Launch Strategy
Venue Launch Visual Treatment
Venue Launch Email Example
Elephante LA Venue Launch Instagram Post
Venue Illustration Roster
digital content
Everything at Dorsia is interconnnected and integral to one another. Using the brand guide we developed, here are many of the editorial social media templates we designed.
I designed and shipped templates that aligned with our newly established brand identity. As a young company, we aimed to develop our brand voice and visual identity in a way that no other company has, so that when someone sees a post on their feed they know uts a Dorsia post. We also wanted our posts to feel playful, cheeky while sometimes frank, observant, curatorial, well traveled, elevated yet informal. That’s what I worked on developing, and you can see my explorations below.
Social Media Templates
I built out investor decks that were used to update our investors from our seed round and several rounds of our capital raises (not pictured for privacy), designed Linkedin Banners for every employee to use, among other assets.
Internal Resources
PRODUCT
DEVELOPMENT
Dorsia serves two main audiences, businesses and customers. The way they do this is through the Dorsia app. One that allows their hospitality partners track bookings, revenue, and other metrics, and the other that allows restaurant-goers to browse where they want to dine.
We have a skilled team of developers for the Dorsia app. My creative team often worked hand in hand with them to help ideate new changes to the app after evaluating analytics and data about what our users tend to click on the most, the pages that are the most engaged with etc. I was a part of the concepting for this. I also was responsible for updating our in-house platform when we launch a new venue which directly would appear on the app.
App Development
Snapshots of the Dorsia App for consumers.