An NFC business card that makes paper obsolete — and needed a brand to match. I was brought in to design everything from zero: identity, card, packaging, unboxing experience. Six weeks. One brief. A complete brand system that launched, sold — to corporates and direct to consumers, and held up until Apple made it irrelevant.
My friend's first instinct was to go corporate — something safe for a boardroom pitch. I pushed back. A product called "the coolest card ever" can't have a logo that looks like a bank. The brand had to earn the claim.
So I explored everything across six days. Angular felt aggressive. The NFC wave icon felt derivative. Abstract marks were forgettable. Every version taught me what I wasn't looking for. Hover to see where each one fell short.
After 15 explorations, the answer was the one thing I hadn't tried: just the name. Lowercase, rounded sans, no icon. No metaphor. No NFC wave. When the product does something remarkable, the logo's job is to stay out of the way. My friend wanted boardroom credibility. This gave him that — and felt human at the same time.
The card needed to sit on a retail shelf next to phone cases and cables and immediately communicate: this is different. The headline wrote itself — lowercase, no question mark, no exclamation point. A statement, not a pitch. If you need to explain why it's cool, it isn't.
The back told the product story without noise: NFC, QR, 25+ platforms, update anytime, never reprint. Everything someone needed to know before committing to something new.
When someone opens the package for the first time, that moment belongs to the brand just as much as the shelf does. I designed the welcome letter to land like a punch of personality — playful, direct, a little proud of what you just bought.
"What a pull! Start tapping." Three words. They tell you exactly what you're holding and they make you smile doing it. Every piece of print in the box was part of the same system. Nothing was an afterthought, even the bits most designers would have skipped.
Nobody asked for a bilingual envelope. I designed one anyway — Arabic and English on the same line, the way they coexist in Cairo every single day. The Cairo pyramid stamp. The NFC postmark with "happy tapping" in a circle. The details nobody required are exactly what people remember.
Taggi went to market. Corporates bought it. Individuals bought it. The brand held up in every room it walked into — on a retail shelf, in a pitch deck, in a CEO's hands during a sales demo. The "coolest card ever" claim landed exactly as intended.
The constraints I was working with: no budget for photography, a six-week timeline, and a founder who wasn't sure a wordmark would feel premium enough for B2B. I had to show — not tell — why simpler was stronger. The sales results did that eventually.
Then Apple opened NFC natively across iOS. The problem Taggi solved was solved by the operating system itself, for free, on a billion phones. That's not a failure. That's timing.
What I take from it: I built a complete visual system under real constraints — alongside a founder who trusted me to push back when needed — and shipped something that worked for as long as the problem existed. That's the job.