Brand (logo and other visual and product and pr aspects), web and more

We plan to create two brands: one for the goods exchange service itself. It's functions will be analogous to to the ones performed by other auction or delivery services, the new exchange will differ in:
-the way it treats buyers (by provoding them a constant level of service)
- the way it treats sellers (by reducing informational and valuational inefficiencies
- the way it manages its own risk and the risk of the customers.

In particular, the goods sold will be standardized and of high quality, just like financial futures

iPhones that have not been in use are a good example here.
When people are buying not a new sealed iPhone from the Apple Store in a sealed box, but from a seller without a name, the are willing to get a good discount and no pre-paid shipping. The quality of the iPhone's not sold by Apple is uncertain.
And performing the roles that are used to improve the finical markets will make many markets more transparent, liquid and efficient.

That's for the first brand.

The plan to create a separate brand in our group fo a non-bank clearing company which will secure the payments (as goods are sold for money and payments is an essential function, if you know what I mean).
Like eBay and PayPal, to be intuitive.

We plan to outsource all the work that comes from the fields we have not invested into. And the case with the design is that you need a really good proffesional designer to provide the best user experience and create bulk of the value. And we do not have a professional designer or user experience specialist, anyone close to the word "art".

We all have finance or IT background, nothing close to user experience, if you ask me. in particular, we consider our IT, risk management, project administration, finance, business and production process management best of the breed or intent to make them best.

2) this is an Internet startup. And the web part of the story is one of the most important. While we excel in the back office part, we need you to design what people will use in their everyday lives: a product delivering both what it's supposed to and being very advanced in the visual images.

We personally love what Apple and Microsoft do with their mobile operating systems design. Talking about other references, we love what Pinterest does in selecting information relevant fo the customer and getting customers to share the information-generate content. In seller experience and visual representation (e.g. quality of photos of the sold goods and delivery) we will try to reach the heights if Airbnb and uber. And we love simple designs (some call this Swedish minimalism)

Our basic principle is absolute transparency and and sharing of the service that creates value on transparency. Because we beleive it is bad to charge for the provision of mass informational service. Furthermore, we will charge no commissions from the buyers or sellers for any transaction or getting the funds out of our clearing centre. We plan to generate cash from other sources.

Summing up,

For the first time you need to design two brands (names and sketch of the logo) and a few basic web layouts: 1) where the popular goods/categories are displayed and what people see when they first get to the website
2) the page of a good: the trading information (volumes, prices), good description, reviews and ratings, list of sellers and their prices together. Reviews, sellers, goods, etc will be rated by customers, the rating shoul be displayed as horizontal bars, # bars reflecting the combined popularity, rating and (if applicable) price. This page should give you the feel of the product while being rather standardized in terms of how it provides the trading information and other necessary data.
This might be distributed to several pages

3) the personal account information page (this is a clearing centre webpage) it shows, what accounts the customer has, what is the balance on them, allows to top-up the accounts or move the balance to anywhere, as well as deposit funds for trading, enter credit card number, all this stuff.

I must say that only high-level pictures, sketches are need for now.

As a new business we need to present our aims and abilities and attitude via web and on their media, the most important being 2-3 long PDFs describing the core idea and description of service and showing the visual material (brand identity, quality of design, etc.)

So, 3-4 photoshop pictures of brand, 3-4 pictures of web interface with a short description of key design features (with a description of options if they are available, I.e. "We can do all in blue") and 2 pictures of the design for stationary (a4 and slide).