Overview

Between July 2020 and December 2021, I led the full rebrand of BeInCrypto as Creative Director & Design Lead. Working closely with the newly formed Marketing team and executive leadership, I built the company’s first brand foundations and design system while guiding strategy, research, and execution.

Key outcomes:

• Unified brand identity documented for the first time (mission, values, personas, tone, and archetypes).

• Established BeInCrypto’s first scalable Design System, covering 12 languages and multiple platforms.

• Simplified site navigation and improved usability through UX audits and testing with 30+ participants.

• Created clear audience personas and positioning, aligning leadership on long-term vision.

• Delivered a modern, cohesive identity that differentiated BeInCrypto in a crowded crypto media landscape.

About
BeInCrypto is one of the largest cryptocurrency news platforms worldwide, with an online presence in 12 languages. Due to its rapid growth, the company’s brand identity had become fragmented and uninspiring, no longer reflecting its vision for the future. I was tasked with leading the full rebranding effort, from strategy and research through to execution, in close collaboration with the newly formed Marketing department.

Context & Challenge

When I joined as Design Lead, both the design and marketing departments were being created from scratch. There was no brand documentation, no guidelines, and no shared strategy. The rapid scaling of BeInCrypto had left the identity inconsistent and the user experience cluttered and difficult to navigate. We needed to build the brand’s foundations while simultaneously addressing usability issues and creating a scalable design system, because let's face it, at that point it looked like any blog out of a free template.

Workshop 1: Brand Refinement

My first initiative was to run a brand workshop with the executive board. The objective was to gather insights, align leadership, and establish a unified direction. To structure the session, I used four guiding questions:

• Who is our main audience?

• What is our mission?

• What is BeInCrypto’s personality?

• What is our elevator pitch?

Through this exercise we established:

Audience and Positioning

BeInCrypto’s core audience was young, tech-savvy newcomers to crypto, alongside investors and professionals already in the industry. They were mainly concentrated in Europe, the US, South America, and India, and often shared similar traits: curious, innovative, open-minded, and eager to shape their financial future without getting lost in technical complexity.

We broke this down further by priority groups: at the center were newbies, millennials, and young investors, followed by traders, industry leaders, and crypto businesses. Around them sat secondary audiences such as institutional actors, advertisers, and gamers, while more peripheral groups included students, travellers, artists, and fintech VCs.

Demographically, most were men in their mid-20s to mid-30s, though the reach spanned from teenagers to professionals in their 50s. Many were students or freelancers, but we also saw C-level executives and professionals with finance or MBA backgrounds among the readership. Geographically, the brand already had strong traction in Spanish-speaking markets alongside English-speaking regions.

Psychographically, what united them was a mindset: they were tech-savvy, innovative, and future-oriented, with a mix of anti-system attitudes and entrepreneurial ambition. Some were risk-takers chasing quick wins, others were cautious investors seeking long-term independence, but across the spectrum they were looking for clarity, accessibility, and inspiration.

Competitors

Once the audience was clear, the next step was to understand BeInCrypto’s competitive landscape. We mapped both direct competitors in the crypto news space and indirect players in finance and education.

At the low-cost, high-volume end were sites like Bitcoinist, NewsBTC, and AMBcrypto, focused on quantity over quality. Slightly higher up were mainstream portals such as Yahoo Finance and Decrypt, which offered broader coverage but lacked depth. Premium players like The Block, Investing.com, Coindesk, CoinMarketCap, and CryptoGlobe competed on authority and exclusivity, while Cointelegraph and Investopedia occupied the middle ground as accessible but professional sources. Finally, outlets like Bloomberg Crypto represented the most premium “local” benchmark, bringing financial credibility into the crypto space.

Through this mapping, we identified where BeInCrypto stood:

• Strengths included educational content, global presence in multiple languages, evergreen articles, a growing social media community, unique design, and participation in The Trust Project.

• Weaknesses centered around brand alignment, lack of exclusives, limited authority in the industry, weaker social media presence, and no video or data-driven products. The website itself also suffered from cluttered design and lack of clear USP.

• Opportunities were plentiful: collaboration with universities, blockchain-based education, trader-focused communities, and the chance to produce more exclusives.

• Threats included external factors like regulation, volatility in the crypto market, and user distrust, as well as competitive pressure from established media and the dominance of platforms like Google.

The conclusion was clear: BeInCrypto had the right direction — strong in education and global reach — but needed to sharpen its brand identity and build authority to stand out. By leaning into personality, trust, and community, the brand could carve a distinctive place in an increasingly crowded market.

Mission and Values

From these insights we defined the mission: to close the education gap in crypto by making knowledge accessible, reliable, and engaging. For leadership, this mission became the guiding principle behind content, product, and design. It meant empowering newcomers with simple explanations, informing professionals with timely analysis, and always simplifying without dumbing down. At its core, the mission was about democratizing access to blockchain knowledge and making crypto more trustworthy to a global audience.

To support this, we articulated a set of values: serious and trustworthy, objective in reporting, fast in delivery, high-quality in execution, and friendly in tone. These values balanced the credibility expected from a financial publisher with the approachability of a lifestyle brand.

Personality

We then mapped personality and tone of voice. BeInCrypto aligned with a blend of the Sage (knowledgeable and trustworthy), the Creator (innovative and inspiring), and the Explorer (daring and adventurous). This mix reflected both the company’s reality and its aspiration. Practically, this meant shifting away from being overly serious and passive, towards being friendlier, more engaging, trend-driven, and outspoken — a brand readers could trust but also feel inspired by.

This exercise revealed a clear aspiration: BeInCrypto wanted to be perceived as a progressive, outspoken, and innovative guide that made crypto feel exciting yet accessible. We want to be the creators, sage, explorers, a bit magician and a bit rulers.

Elevator pitch

Finally, we condensed all of this work into a simple elevator pitch that could be used internally and externally:

BeInCrypto is a hub that offers knowledge to the Innovative Generation, delivering blockchain insights in a way that is clear, engaging, and accessible.

This statement became a touchstone for the rebrand — a reminder that the goal wasn’t just reporting on crypto, but helping an entire generation understand and shape the future of finance.

Workshop 2: Persona Definition

With the core identity documented, I led a second workshop to define user personas. We created four fictional archetypes based on stakeholder knowledge, analytics, and competitive research:

• Alex, the Crypto Explorer (22): Streamer, adventurous, ambitious, and motivated by FOMO. Loves trends, gaming, NFTs, and wants quick wins in crypto.

• Lena, the Crypto Newbie (30): Freelance illustrator, creative, curious, but intimidated by jargon. Seeks financial independence and a supportive community.

• Manuel, the Crypto Savvy (34): Project manager, early adopter, deeply informed. Wants technical analysis, reliable news, and to stay ahead of the market.

• David, the Crypto Curious Investor (54): Senior banker, careful and strategic. Sees crypto as long‑term investment but struggles with steep learning curves.

To prioritise, we ran a voting exercise with the leadership team. The chosen focus became Alex, the Crypto Explorer — young, ambitious, eager to learn, and emblematic of the audience BeInCrypto needed to capture for long‑term growth. This clarity gave us a tangible user lens to guide tone, visuals, and product decisions.

With the persona defined, we moved on to mapping their user journey in order to visualize how “Alex, the Crypto Explorer” actually interacted with BeInCrypto. The goal wasn’t just to document steps, but to uncover pain points, drop-offs, and emotional states throughout the experience — from hearing about a new coin, to visiting the site, scanning articles, joining the Telegram group, and eventually making investment decisions. This exercise helped us see the journey from the user’s perspective, revealing where content felt overwhelming, navigation was unclear, or community tools weren’t engaging enough. By capturing both frustrations and motivations, the journey map became a practical bridge between the strategic persona work and the tangible design decisions we would later implement.

Research insights

Taken together, the workshops and competitor analysis gave leadership a shared view of BeInCrypto’s market landscape. We now had a clear picture of who the audience was, what they needed, and where the brand stood against competitors. The conclusion was that BeInCrypto’s greatest opportunity lay in its role as an educational and accessible platform — but only if it could strengthen its identity, authority, and user experience.

UX Process

While the branding work gave BeInCrypto a strategic foundation, the user experience on the website told a different story. Pages were cluttered, navigation unclear, and user engagement low. To address this, I led a full UX audit combining heuristic evaluation, heatmap testing, analytics, and competitor benchmarking.

We began with a multi-rater heuristic review, where team members from design, product, and editorial scored the site against eight key criteria — from content precision and site structure to look & feel, coherence, and feedback. The results showed a clear pattern: although BeInCrypto performed relatively well in multilingual support and language consistency, it scored poorly on site structure, brand coherence, and visual identity. Reviewers described the interface as noisy, incoherent, and often confusing. To make sense of this, we clustered the findings into an affinity map that revealed five major pain points: lack of brand identity, undefined information architecture, overwhelming visual noise from ads and sidebars, unintuitive UI, and minimal system feedback for users.

To complement this qualitative view, we turned to Hotjar heatmaps and scroll maps. These showed that readers rarely made it past the top sections of articles. Engagement dropped steeply after the first few paragraphs, leaving entire portions of content unseen. Calls-to-action like “share this article” or “join the community” had negligible interaction rates, often buried at the bottom of endless scrolls. The data confirmed what the heuristic review had suggested: articles were too long, unscannable, and lacked visual hierarchy to keep users engaged.

Next, we analyzed Google Analytics dashboards to understand behavior at scale. Organic search accounted for over half of site traffic, but bounce rates hovered around 75–80%, with session durations averaging just over one minute. Conversion rates on affiliate links and community CTAs were under 0.3%, far below industry benchmarks. When comparing page performance, news articles brought spikes in traffic but low retention, while the “Learn” section showed better engagement yet lacked visibility. The conclusion was clear: content was valuable, but its presentation and discoverability were failing.

To see what “good” looked like, we conducted a competitor benchmark against Coindesk, The Block, Cointelegraph, and Investopedia. These sites prioritized scannability and clarity: shorter paragraphs, clear typography, visual hierarchy, and strategically placed CTAs that appeared at natural breakpoints in the reading journey. In contrast, BeInCrypto’s templates were visually dense, navigation was inconsistent, and users had no clear path between news, education, and tools.

Together, these insights formed a consistent picture. The website’s issues were not just aesthetic, but structural: too much information, too little guidance, and too many barriers to action.

Based on the audit, we redefined the information architecture into four clear entry points: News, Learn, Prices, and Community. Article templates were redesigned to include summaries, subheadings, and scannable blocks, with CTAs moved into high-attention zones identified by heatmaps. Navigation was simplified, ads were rebalanced to reduce visual noise, and system feedback patterns (empty states, confirmations, loading) were introduced for clarity. Finally, these improvements were embedded into the design system, ensuring consistency across all 12 languages and both light and dark modes.

The UX audit was pivotal. It translated abstract pain points into tangible evidence — heatmaps, data, and heuristics — that not only guided the redesign but also gave leadership confidence that usability and engagement would improve as a direct result of strategic design changes.

UX Testing

To validate improvements, we developed prototypes and ran usability tests with 30 Maze participants (80% crypto beginners). Key findings:

• Navigation was intuitive and straightforward.

• Content was comprehensive but overwhelming.

• The interface was forgettable and lacked brand identity.

The results confirmed that beyond usability, a stronger and more distinctive identity was essential.

Workshop 3: Design Routes

With research complete, I directed the creative exploration phase. Two visual routes emerged:

Route 1: Pixel‑inspired, bold, experimental typography and bright color schemes. Aimed to differentiate strongly from competitors with a daring personality.

Route 2: Gamified, tech‑driven, sharp lines, readable typography, and engaging but functional colors. Designed for accessibility and sustained reading.

We tested both routes with target users. Route 2 was selected, offering the right balance of modern energy and trustworthiness. This became the foundation of the new BeInCrypto identity.

Design System

From the chosen direction, I oversaw the creation of BeInCrypto’s first Design System, developed in collaboration with engineering. It included typography, color palettes, grids, components, and templates, scalable across 12 languages and multiple platforms. Dark‑mode variants were also introduced, aligning with user habits and industry trends.

Outcome

The rebrand delivered a modern, cohesive identity aligned with BeInCrypto’s ambition and global reach. Navigation was simplified, usability improved, and the platform gained a distinctive visual personality in a crowded crypto media market. Beyond the visual identity, we established long‑term strategic foundations: brand documentation, persona frameworks, competitor positioning, and a design system.

Measuring the Impact

Once the visual direction was chosen and the first version of the design system and redesigned site were in place, we ran a round of remote moderated usability testing to validate the improvements. The test involved 20 participants (7 women, 13 men), aged 21–40, with 76% of the panel being complete crypto beginners recruited through our Telegram community.

The objective was to see how well the new structure, navigation, and visual system worked for our target persona — the Crypto Explorer.

Key findings:

• Simplified main categories (News, Learn, Prices, Community) helped participants explore confidently.

• Trend tags successfully drew attention to different topics, making it easier to switch between themes.

• Trading graphs remained challenging for some, signaling the need for clearer visual design and explanatory layers.

• Visually differentiated sections encouraged scrolling and exploration, reducing early drop-offs.

The metrics reinforced these observations. Under the old design, the drop-off rate was nearly 96% with an average time on page of just over one minute. After the redesign, the drop-off rate fell to 86% and average time on page increased to nearly three minutes. Just as importantly, participants described the site as having a clearer brand identity and more intuitive structure.

These results validated the direction we had taken: the rebrand and design system not only made BeInCrypto visually distinctive but also measurably improved usability and engagement.

Reflections & Learnings

This project was about more than creating a new logo or interface — it was about building the brand from the ground up. By leading research workshops, persona definition, and UX audits, I facilitated alignment between leadership and product teams. The experience showed me that rebranding in a high‑growth environment requires as much facilitation and strategy as it does design execution. It also reinforced the value of personas and archetypes in guiding creative work, and the importance of investing early in scalable systems.

For BeInCrypto, the rebrand was a turning point: transforming a fragmented identity into a cohesive, trusted brand ready for global growth.