It didn’t take Google long to follow into Facebook footsteps and change the look of their social website. Unlike Facebook, the change was not as drastic and didn’t leave an unprepared profile looking plain. Still, an updated look meant some redecorating on our (the PayLane’s) part.
Google offered two possible looks of the site: one involved a long cover picture and the other offered a chopped version, composing of five small squared pictures. At first, the first option seemed to be a good idea, but soon proved to be rather tricky. The chopped version was much more interesting to design.

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Everybody (and their uncle) knows about the Facebook Timeline. On March 30th the brand profiles changed their look. Some companies embraced the Timeline earlier, which made the design job a real challenge: how to do something quite original and stay within the borders of company’s policy?
PayLane’s TimeLine – time-consuming but rewarding
We wanted something special for the PayLane’s Facebook cover. Naturally, it had to be connected with our business: credit cards, online payments… But we wanted the cover to convey more than that. We wanted to show that we are a group of people with passion for payments.
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If some of you were wondering what a graphic designer actually does at a payment processing company, now is the time to lift the shroud of mystery. Designing a 404/500 error page seems rather trivial (especially in comparison to infographics), but it proved an interesting task.
You could have seen the finished designs in one of the previous posts. I’d like to show you some of the designs that could have been… And why they didn’t make it. In other words: welcome to my sketchbook.
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Recently, the owners of the Chase Sapphire Credit Cards (signed by Visa) might have been surprised, finding their new card looking slightly different than they were used to. The 16-digit number, the expiration date and Visa logo were moved to the other side, leaving just the name of the cardholder and the bank on the front.
Redesign is not an easy thing to do. If done carelessly, it may prove hazardous. One may recollect a recent redesign of the Pepsi logo – not received well by the general public. Some concepts and designs are so deeply rooted in people’s minds that even a slight change seems odd and takes quite a long time to get used to. The truth is that there should be a really good reason behind the redesign. It can be done to refresh the brand or to appeal to new markets. It may be done to differentiate oneself from the competition, to enhance usability… Or to stress a unique feature of a new product.
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Credit cards can be pretty, there’s no arguing about that. They can also become the base for a work of art, as was demonstrated by the Graphic Design Museum in Breda (the Netherlands), in 2009. The museum ordered a collage created out of different types of credit cards, gift cards and discount cards from all over the world.
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