The Redesign of DIAS - Brand Identity and Website

Ushering a bold, customer-facing identity and website.

The Client – DIAS S.A.

DIAS S.A. was founded in 1989 as the central online payments and clearings hub in Greece, owned by The Bank of Greece and Greece’s systemic credit institutions. DIAS’ mission is to modernize electronic payments in Greece to the benefit of the country’s economy and enhance its role as the link between electronic transactions and service providers. The company’s key clients are public organizations and private companies.

Brand renaissance

In 2021 DIAS SA requested the redesign of its brand’s identity and website for the first time in 20 years. Linakis.digital and the Sputnik design team, were tasked to usher in the household brand to the digital era with a bold, customer-facing identity and website. DIAS S.A. has always operated backend services, largely hidden from everyday users, who are unaware of the company’s pivotal role in every single transaction. The stakeholder’s strategic benchmark was to bring the brand out of the limelight and into the public eye with a vibrant new logo, supporting material and website.
Our teams approached the brief as an invitation to break the conservative norms of rigid design often indicative of financial sector brands and design a new logo and website for the digital era. The new logo retains the semantic significance of the word Dias (Zeus) and reintroduces the lightning as a modern symbol that denotes strength, efficiency, and speed. The logo is a simple diagonal form, the lightning, which houses the brand name DIAS. The rich dynamic of the symbol’s diagonal provides the bedrock for supporting visual assets in purple, blue and zing yellow, both in the digital and physical worlds. Diagonal patterns, lines, and layouts are introduced across the new website and corporate stationery, and a vibrant colour scheme speaks of modernity and digitality, maximized in the backlit environment of screens.

A bright, modern, and eye-pleasing look and feel

Although the financial services industry is a very difficult area to practice creative techniques, our team of creative Interactive Designers managed to deliver a fresh and appealing look and feel. The design, the structure, and the personality of the website are consistent with the overall brand identity. The choice of simple lines and strong color palette combined with sans serif typography, enhance the perception of a modern digital organization.  Moreover, the appearance of the website changes depending on the sections and topics that the user is visiting.

Implementing Technological solutions with emphasis on performance

The new Interbanking Systems’ website is implemented on the Umbraco CMS, which offers flexibility and powerful content management capabilities. The platform meets the client’s requirements regarding seamless content editing, and discoverability of content via fast and powerful search.

Regarding development, a series of best practices were applied to ensure flawless appearance and behavior as well as to minimize the page loading time. The solution is hosted on the company’s proprietary infrastructure which has been configured appropriately. Content and data are synchronized via uSync.

The new website was designed to appear optimally on all devices with a special focus on mobile. It is also compliant with the Greek and European regulations that demand enhanced accessibility for people with disabilities. Besides Umbraco emphasizes on GDPR, offering a lot of functionalities and among them, the flexibility to support the policies chosen by the organization.

Increasing Search Engine Optimization Turnover

• The optimum Search Engine Ranking helped Interbanking Systems’ website to appear in the first results of search engines and thus to increase its discoverability. To accomplish that we used the industry’s SEO best practices:
  
  • Compliance with W3C XHTML
  • Use of Header Tags
  • Use of alt tags on multimedia files
  • Use of links on text
  • User-friendly links
  • Sitemap to facilitate inner pages indexing
  • High response speed

  Before releasing the new website, we applied a bunch of checks, to ensure that it is performing best in search engines.

In Numbers

Within the first 4 months:

• 5.6 thousand engaged users visited the website, indicating high reach factor, given the brand’s low search intent.
• The average engagement time per user increased to 120 minutes, indicating that visitors remain on the site long enough to complete their tasks.
• The average engagement time per session increased to 100 minutes, indicating that the new information architecture is more effective.