Pantry's founders came to me with only an idea and nothing else. Speaking with them on a weekly basis sometimes twice, I sat through and get to understand their vision of where they wanted Pantry to go.
Time was tight and for them to pitch for funding they needed something done within a month. So we drafted the brand strategy as quickly as possible in a 2 days workshop. From there we immediately developed a brand identity that could help in their digital and print collaterals.
We also conducted surveys for one of our target audience to get an understanding of how they feel about the job searching journey. After which we asked them to ask what they thought was a "stupid question" and we created visuals out of it for future social media campaigns.
I came up with the name Pantry to make it relatable to employees at a workplace and did the design as soon as the name was approved. After the branding was done we got started on the digital platform and the main product being the forum is where we spent a bulk of time on.
We have been through multiple rounds of forum designs already and as it is still a work in progress we haven't fully developed it yet.
Due to a short amount of time given I recommended using a ready built forum as a placeholder first, and if it works out fine we might carry it to the beta launch until we are ready to build our own.
As there are no developers in the team except 1 of the 2 stakeholders who had experience in coding, we built a very simple website enough for an alpha launch first.
Nonetheless we are continuing to design and develop the full platform behind the scenes, below you can see the forum and blog feature I have designed but not yet tested.