Market Power

Market Power is a Sovcombank project: an investment magazine in comic-book form. A tremendous amount of work went into it: illustrations in a single consistent style were drawn for several hundred US and Russian listed companies.

Investor's website

Based on the Market Power magazine, we designed an investment website.

The first design followed the magazine’s style. A grid of comic tiles filled the entire page, and clicking a tile opened the company card. The logo was set in the brand typeface, and the site’s main color was to be purple, changing from issue to issue.

The client rejected this design, worried that it was too different from conventional solutions. Competitors mostly use classic designs on a white background with a more standard, interface-like presentation.

The client approved the second design. Company tiles still take up most of the screen, but the text is separated from the illustrations and set in a standard typeface, with the company logo placed on top of each tile. Filtering by sector gets more attention.

The design adapts to any screen size, including tablets and phones. Sectors and collections are grouped into dropdown lists.

Each company has its own page divided into subsections. The first is a company overview with a video from Market Power, comic-style illustrations, the company’s history, key facts, and a list of strengths and risks.

Every section of the site was designed for both desktop and mobile.

The Indicators section contains a table of fundamental indicators and financial statements, often used by experienced investors. Special attention went into adapting wide tables for mobile devices.

Bond advisor

I also designed a website for choosing bonds, which was to be built on top of Market Power.

The project, code-named Skydviser, is essentially a table: the horizontal axis shows time to maturity and the vertical axis shows credit rating. Bond cards sit in the table cells.

The point of the service is to highlight bonds that yield more than a bank deposit. The difference from the deposit rate is shown in large bold type and also indicated by the card’s color.

Each card groups several bonds with the same rating and maturity. Clicking a card opens the list of bonds.

Mobile app

The Market Power magazine is built into the Sovcombank Investments mobile app.

On the search screen, companies appear as familiar tiles, but with comic illustrations instead of photos. Each tile shows the company’s logo, name and ticker.

Each company has its own page in the app. The company overview is presented as text with illustrations from the comics.

Besides the overview, each company is assessed by valuation, competitive advantages and investment rating.

Companies may issue bonds as well as stocks. The app shows all of a company’s securities, along with ETFs and securities of related companies.

The app lets you trade stocks directly, so it includes price charts and an order book.

For advanced investors, the app offers a summary table of fundamental indicators and financial statements.

The comics appear in company search mode. The app also has an asset search mode, where securities are shown in the usual way, grouped by type: stocks, bonds and funds. In this mode, you can see all securities in a single list.

Flexible filters let you find securities by rating, industry, trading volume, yield, currency and more.

The app also shows top gainers, the most popular stocks, a calendar of dividend and coupon payments, and much more.

Due to sanctions, the Sovcombank Investments app is available for Android through RuStore, while iOS users only have the web version.