The goal of the rebranding was to bring local courier delivery companies in 8 countries together under one Borzo brand.

The problem was that neither design nor engineering had a shared foundation for the upcoming rebranding: each local brand had its own color scheme, its own design for marketing pages and newsletters. There were no shared rules for SMM or advertising creatives either.

My task was to prepare a shared design system that product, marketing, and engineering could rely on.

The launch of the new brand took a couple of days, while the preparation took months. Long before the transition day, the design team began building a design system together with engineering.

Our system had two levels: the first was the visual foundation of the brand, and the second was applied systems. The foundation established a shared language: colors, typography, grid, icons, shapes, radii, and shadows. The applied systems used this foundation for specific product and marketing tasks.

After the rebranding, the product had to look like a single brand, but every rule has exceptions. In our case, there were 8 countries under the Borzo brand and 2 countries under local brands – Turkey and Russia. In addition, a small share of users in Borzo countries still remained in the old apps.

To keep the design from turning into a manual rebuild of every layout, we created a system of color skins. It consisted of four groups: the product skin, primary palette, secondary palette, and accent palette. The palettes were built so they could work with different skins – pink, green, and blue. This was the key principle behind localization.

A few years after the rebranding, it became clear that Borzo’s visual language needed to change. There were two reasons for this. On the product side, the main customer segment had changed, and the previous visual language no longer reflected the new values. On the design side, the visual techniques had started to age and repeat more often. As a result, we decided to update the brand guidelines. The design team took on the full update, and I led the process.

We decided not to build everything from scratch, but to improve what was already working. By that point, the system’s issues had become visible: the palette was too dense, the base black did not have enough contrast, and the shapes felt too soft and rounded.

We added two extra color levels – 20% and 50% of the base tone, expanded the set of accent colors, and aligned the palette by color temperature. We replaced the base black with a higher‑contrast black. We designed new icons and blocks for marketing pages. We reduced the corner radii, making the interface feel more composed and calmer.

After updating the brand guidelines, we brought the new visual language into the product: we rebuilt the home page and part of the flows in the client app.

The design changed gradually. The product looked fresher, but still felt familiar to users.