Santander

Executive Creative Director

// Digital Design, UI/UX Design, Art, Brand, Social, Storytelling, Digital Transformation

Santander

// Digital Transformation

2020—2022

Responsibilities

As Executive Creative Director, I led the creative vision and design strategy for Santander's global corporate website redesign, focused on delivering a customer-centric experience that aligns with the brand's core values. My team and I facilitated research workshops and stakeholder collaboration to define the site’s goals, ensuring the content met the needs of diverse audiences across 16 areas and 10 markets. We identified opportunities through user interviews in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and Brazil, and developed three conceptual directions, with the winning design being the Gaia concept. The resulting modular website design offered a user-friendly structure and intuitive navigation, connecting content through meta-themes rather than organizational silos. The clean, visually impactful layout placed Santander's content at the forefront, enhancing the brand’s identity while ensuring functional and inspirational elements. A new governance model was introduced to harmonize editorial roles and processes, driving consistency and alignment across regions. This redesign led to an 88% increase in monthly user engagement, with significant global reach, empowering 144 million customers and 200,000 employees worldwide.

context

Santander is a leading banking group in Europe, North America and South America with a solid standing and reputation and its steadfast commitment to employees, customers, shareholders, and communities. For more than 160 years, Santander has constantly evolved, revitalised, and adapted to the current market requirements.

These last few years have been vital for securing its leadership position. Santander continues to focus on meaningful innovation, international expansion, and its commitment to ever-growing responsibility in banking practices.

CHallenge

How do you create a corporate website that is true to the brand and simultaneously delivers a unique customer experience? By focusing on the people.

Santander aimed to draw a new Corporate Digital Experience that embodies a sincere and coherent personality aligned with their values, providing their audiences with relevant and contextual information aggregated from different sources with a familiar voice in a timely way.

Santander wanted to fulfil its audience's inspiration and information needs: those who are part of them, those who follow them, and those who wish to become part of their team. To achieve its goal, Designit focused on places where the audiences create and consume the content.

Solution/execution

How was it carried out? First, the team launched a research workshop where they defined the challenges and pillars of the new website, and the objectives of the vision were co-created with the stakeholders. Then, after reviewing and analysing existing material and heuristic analysis of the current site, interviews were launched with Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and Brazil. Once the areas of opportunity were identified, the team drew three conceptual lines, and Gaia was the winning concept. The last phase focused on the iterative digital design process.

The result? A specialized and differentiated digital experience where fixed contents (stories, press releases, and news) are linked together through tags in meta-themes aligned with the user interests rather than organizational silos.

The website'smodular structure and new navigation bring balance, functionality, and inspirational content. A clean visual language brings the content front and centre to empower the Santander brand. A new governance model aligns with the priorities of 16 areas and 10 markets and defines editorial roles and processes to create a harmonic voice.