Why MDPI needed one brand across eight initiatives

MDPI had operated for 25 years without a brand. Each of its eight initiatives had developed its own look. There were no shared UI components, no colour system, no typography hierarchy and no style guide. The brand felt fragmented across print, digital and dozens of publications.

The raw material was a challenge too. MDPI’s main visual asset was scientific imagery, often at very low resolution and unusable at scale.

Brand identity and design system, from freelance to in-house

Joined in 2020 as a freelancer from my practice in Amsterdam, approached by MDPI’s senior leadership, and continued in-house from 2022. Started with the brand identity in print, then moved on to the design system for digital products.

The core team was two people: me and a project sponsor from leadership. Worked closely with Graphic Design (print and video), Marketing, editorial designers, the project owners of each initiative and, later, a newly hired front-end team.

Design system process: from scientific imagery to Figma components

Survey, brand attributes, readability tests, subject map and foundations.

Craft lives here: annotate why this typeface, these colours, this grid.

Key decision: turning low-resolution imagery into the identity

MDPI’s main visual material was low-resolution scientific imagery, unusable at scale. Instead of working around it, the system uses it as the source of the identity. Rendered as halftone, MDPI’s own research became an abstract visual signature that works the same on a printed cover and in a web component.

Because the identity comes from what MDPI publishes, it feels specific to the company. Every initiative can draw on the same material without diluting the brand. That consistency made one unified design system across all eight initiatives possible.

Raw image → halftone → colour.

Results: one design system for eight initiatives

• Only each initiative’s own colour was kept from the old components.
• Marketing and leadership described the brand as calmer and more structured. Teams gained a clearer sense of what they were building toward.

Why readers could not find books on MDPI Books

The Books team had no dedicated design or UX role. The team took on the redesign alongside daily work and expected a visual refresh. The Book Builder, the flow authors use to compile books, was full of bugs and had no tracking. Avoidable support requests took time away from building.

User interviews showed the problem went deeper than visuals:

Baseline: 83% landing-page drop-off · 60.51% site-wide bounce rate · 0.87% conversion rate · 3.38 minutes on site

Product design and product management, end to end

Product Designer on the project from first research to launch: UX research, the component library, prototyping, stakeholder management and handoff to development.

With no fixed deadline and little spare capacity on the team, I also took on product management at the start: setting the scope, running alignment and keeping the work moving. The wireframe stage had no front-end developers. Two joined for the prototype stage, hired for this redesign.

UX research process for MDPI Books

Book Builder workflow, new and old components, site map and first sketch.

Craft lives here: new vs old components, with a short note on why each changed.

Key decision: from visual refresh to strategic redesign

The team asked for a new look. The interviews showed three deeper problems: books were hard to find, people did not know what existed, and the publishing flow did not work. A visual refresh would have made these problems look better without solving them.

The research reframed the work as a publishing platform redesign around structure and flows: how readers find books, and how authors get through the Book Builder. Because the new direction came from the team’s own assumptions, tested with real users, the team supported it. That shared direction carried the project through 14 months to launch.

Results after launch: traffic, drop-off and revenue

• Fewer email complaints reached the Books team after the relaunch.
• Tracking now sits behind the Book Builder, so the team can measure what it could not before.

Final layouts on a 12-column grid: homepage, reprints, open access books and series.

Why users left MDPI’s submission system after login

MDPI wanted to unify user accounts in one dashboard. The work started with Susy, the submission system that generates the most revenue and where every user has an account.

Satisfaction looked reassuring: Marketing’s 2024 author survey, with around 37,000 responses, showed an NPS of about 50, and 95% rated their experience good or excellent. Usage data from the second half of 2024 told a different story:

No one owned the full picture across Editorial, Support and Product, so no one could explain the gap.

Lead UX researcher, with a Product Owner and a developer

Ran the research from the first questions to the first wireframes, together with the Product Owner and a developer. The Product Owner helped recruit participants.

The Editorial and Support teams, who work in Susy daily and handle users’ questions and complaints, contributed their knowledge as input.

UX research process: customer journey, user interviews and synthesis

Six patterns emerged:

• Users are goal-driven and want to submit in 30–60 minutes.
• Mixed terms and a dated look cause disorientation.
• Repetitive manual fields reduce satisfaction.
• Login and navigation friction hurts first impressions.
• Users want one role-aware dashboard.
• Optional features like cover letters are mostly ignored.

Customer journey, affinity map and pain point matrix (participant names removed).

Key decision: start with one product and one dashboard

Unifying accounts across every MDPI product at once would have been a large change that was hard to approve. Instead, the work started with Susy, the product with the most revenue and the one every user has an account for. We proposed a single dashboard as the first step, without major changes to the submission system itself.

A dashboard was concrete and low-risk, which made it easy for stakeholders to say yes. That support opened the door to look deeper: into the metrics, the NPS and, through the customer journey, the evidence for why users left.

Results: six validated patterns and a dashboard direction

The UX research reframed User Hub from a UI refresh into an evidence-based redesign. For the first time, MDPI could explain why satisfaction scores and usage data disagreed: the survey measured the overall publishing experience, while the interviews showed where users lost their way in the platform.

The wireframes cover a dashboard with submissions and activity, a simpler profile, self-service support and personalised newsletter interests. My part ended after the research and first wireframes, when I left MDPI. The next phase builds on this direction.

Why the lower Old Town of Bern attracts fewer visitors

The lower Old Town is home to small, independent shops, studios, galleries and craft businesses. Tourists pass through, but few stop. Shop turnover and empty retail space had grown in recent months.

The question: which simple measures could make the area more attractive, while respecting the people who live there?

UX research in a team of three

A case study for the CAS in Usability and User Experience at FHNW, in a team of three with a supervising lecturer. Working mostly in digital design, I wanted to understand human behaviour beyond screens.

My part was the second round of street interviews. It validated the findings from the first round and followed up on the open questions it had raised.

UX research process: observation, street interviews and a customer journey

What the research showed:

• Visitors like the small shops and personal advice, but find closed shops and unclear opening hours.
• People walk through the lanes but rarely stop. A shop that already looks busy draws people in.
• Shop owners lack foot traffic and visibility, and mostly work alone rather than together.
• Residents want calm, neighbourhood life and less car traffic.

“I’ve lived here my whole life, and I still don’t understand why no one comes to Postgasse.” Resident, street interview

Key decision: listening to people before planning from the map

Urban planning usually starts with plans, standards and building measures. This study started by listening. Talking to visitors, residents and shop owners surfaced details a spatial analysis would likely miss: unclear opening hours, the rhythm of events and the need to be seen together.

The first six interviews already showed the main barriers. The second round confirmed them.

Results: three priorities for the lower Old Town

• A fixed calendar of regular events, such as every first and third Saturday.
• A shared digital presence with an interactive map of shops, opening hours and events.
• A pop-up system that opens empty shops for temporary use.

The plan starts with a test phase together with the local association in 2026–2027, followed by shared branding and digital tools. The study could not test the measures: in a city, prototypes need time, permits and many people. With more time, the next step would be a digital prototype of the event calendar and map.