LocalTapiola

LocalTapiola is a Finnish mutual insurer and wealth manager owned by its 1.6 million customers. The company’s guiding ethos, ‘elämänturva’ (Finnish for ‘lifelong security’), extends well beyond everyday insurance, encompassing health, finance and wellbeing across every stage of life. In 2018, LocalTapiola embarked on a core system renewal built on Guidewire, overhauling online self-services for private customers, from making a claim to purchasing a policy, simpler and faster. It was the first wave of a broader, multi-year transformation. The brand has since continued to evolve through successive iterations.

Typeface: Kostas Bartsokas
Illustration: La Boca

Within that transformation, my role was to lead and orchestrate design across external design and technology partners and internal product teams. The work meant developing and maintaining a coherent design language and a consistent user experience across all digital touchpoints, across web and mobile and into brand and marketing communications. It shaped a broader refresh of the brand’s visual identity and laid the groundwork for Duet, a shared group-wide design system.

Named for the company’s two brands, LocalTapiola and Turva, Duet was designed to be framework-agnostic and WCAG 2.1 compliant from the outset, built on standardised web platform APIs and Web Components to serve multiple vendors working across disparate technology stacks. Duet pioneered technology-agnostic design systems and has since become a widely referenced model in the field.

Design System Architecture: Ariel Salminen