Skye Mastercard – A Seamless Brand Experience Across Every Touchpoint
Led design for the end-to-end launch of Skye Mastercard, unifying a fragmented sub-brand portfolio into one consistent identity across 8 customer touchpoints — achieving 100% card activation and a 10–15% lift in acquisition sign-ups.
Context
The credit card business was operating as a fragmented portfolio of sub-brands, each with its own identity and customer touchpoints. The rebrand to a single unified identity, Skye, meant transforming every one of those touchpoints across both B2B merchants and B2C cardholders — while clearly communicating the change to each audience, revising card terms, and refining the offerings themselves. The team needed a visual and verbal identity robust enough to scale across every channel, all synchronised to hit a hard launch deadline.
Problem
Launching a brand-new credit card product from scratch meant solving for consistency and trust across a wide range of disconnected touchpoints:
No existing brand system – With no established design system in place, there was a risk of inconsistent UI and brand execution across web, app, email, and print.
Fragmented customer journey – Customers would interact with the brand across many channels — website, app, email, in-store card activation — with no unified experience tying them together.
New product, no trust yet – As a new card in the market, the brand needed to build customer confidence and drive adoption from a standing start, both online and in physical retail moments.
Research
To ground the brand and product decisions in real customer and merchant needs, I combined a few research approaches ahead of design:
Competitor and card design review – Benchmarked three competitor card products and digital banking brands eg. VISA, CBA, Macquarie Bank, to identify best-in-class patterns for card artwork, portal usability, and email engagement.
Merchant stakeholder input – Worked with the Head of UX Design and merchant dealers to understand pain points in tracking sales and leads through the existing portal, shaping the hi-fi prototype direction.
Usability testing – Tested prototypes for the website, Apple Pay flow, and merchant portal with five participants ahead of launch to validate usability before developer handover.
Solution
I designed and delivered a connected suite of experiences, each building brand trust and consistency at a different customer touchpoint:
1. Apple Pay
Designed a co-branded Apple Pay and Skye campaign to inform customers of its benefits — mocking user flows, wireframes, prototypes, and responsive UI for mobile and desktop, then usability testing ahead of launch.
[Image: Co-branded Apple Pay and Skye landing page and marketing email]
2. Website
Designed the consumer-facing website for the new card and brand — covering research, workshop facilitation, user flows, sitemaps, wireframes, prototypes, content, usability testing, and developer handover.
3. Merchant Dealer Portal
Working with the Head of UX Design, designed hi-fi prototypes for the portal merchants use to manage and track sales, running usability testing before finalising the UI through to developer handover.
4. Email Marketing
Designed a suite of email templates to drive engagement and build brand trust — covering desktop and mobile design, content, CTA copywriting, and Litmus testing across clients.
5. Velocity Campaign
Designed a co-branded acquisition campaign with Velocity, encouraging new customers to use their Skye card for flight bookings and rewarding non-members for joining.
[Image: Co-branded Skye and Velocity acquisition campaign]
6. Digital Style Guide
Before Figma Design Systems existed, I built a digital style guide defining styles, fonts, colours, and components for the Skye brand — leading developer walkthroughs and design reviews to keep the front-end build consistent.
[Image: Digital assets and brand style guide used by engineering teams]
7. Card Artwork
Designed bespoke card artwork built to stand out in-wallet while staying true to the Skye brand.
8. Card Carrier Packaging
Working with product and marketing, designed card packaging concepts, prepared final artwork, and signed off on print.
[Image: Card carrier packaging for card activation]
Results
The brand and credit card launch delivered strong results across every customer touchpoint:
Email marketing – Achieved a 30% open rate and a steady 20% click rate
Velocity campaign – Lifted sign-ups by 10–15% following launch
Card carrier packaging – Achieved 100% card activation by customers
Apple Pay & website – Built brand trust through clear, consistent communication that kept customers informed of new card features
Merchant dealer portal – Enabled merchants to track sales pipelines and follow up leads to generate new business
Digital style guide – Gave developers a consistent system to build UI elements across all digital Skye products
Card artwork – Delivered a minimal, cutting-edge card design with consistent brand execution
