Redesign → product strategy
MARS Academy is a digital training school in Bari, and the project I know from every side, having been a student there, then a teacher, and now its designer. What began as a request to rebuild a hacked website turned into a wider rethink of MARS’s offering, positioning and information architecture, built on competitor research and direct work with the school’s owners.
Contribution
The work began with the redesign of the MARS Academy website and expanded into research, competitive analysis, offer architecture, positioning and brand narrative. The objective became identifying what already made the academy valuable, where perception was weakening that value, and how the digital experience could communicate it more clearly.
Analysing the existing experience made one thing clear early on: a new interface alone would not solve the underlying communication problem.
The real problem
Not a quality problem. A perception problem.
Practical teaching, small classes, direct access to professionals, physical presence, portfolio-oriented learning: much of the value was already there. It just wasn’t organized or communicated in a way that made it visible.
Research
A research phase covering the current offer, student motivations and objections, the decision-making process and positioning. The goal was not to copy larger schools, but to understand how contemporary education brands communicate the value of professional training.
Benchmark
IED, RUFA and Epicode were the main references, extended to Boolean, Aulab, Develhope, Start2Impact and Talent Garden, compared on offer clarity, naming, perceived quality, the link between course and profession, and how outcomes are presented.
What makes MARS different
Four competitive assets emerged as a possible foundation for positioning.
In person
Digital education, in person: a differentiator in a market of recorded courses and remote bootcamps.
Small classes
Direct attention, discussion, mentorship and feedback: an experience less anonymous than a large platform.
Working professionals
Teachers who actively work in the fields they teach, without needing to imitate a university.
Learning by doing
Show what students become and what they can put in their portfolio, not only what they study.
Rethinking the offer
The website problem couldn’t be separated from how the offer itself was organized and named. The courses already held strong content: the issue was perception and naming against today’s professional vocabulary. The two-year combined path also read more like “course A + course B” than a distinct third offer.
Graphic Design → Graphic & Digital Design
Making room for Figma, UI design, design systems, UX fundamentals and motion design alongside the existing branding and editorial foundation.
Web Architect → Full Stack Development
Reframing the existing PHP/WordPress foundation around Git, React, TypeScript and modern workflows, with more recognizable naming.
→ Digital Product Creator
An evolution of the combined two-year path: from “two courses” to one distinctive journey from idea to digital product.
[ Naming and programme evolutions are proposals to validate with MARS, not confirmed courses. ]
Where MARS takes you
From “what you study” to what you learn to do, what you can show, and what you can become.
Imagine
Graphic & Digital Design
Graphic Designer · Visual Designer · Brand Designer · Junior UI Designer
Build
Full Stack Development
Front-End Developer · Full Stack Developer · Web Developer
Innovate
Digital Product Creator (proposed)
Product Designer · Creative Technologist · Product Creator
The path from awareness to enrolment had few intermediate steps. Workshops, open days and other physical formats were explored as lower-friction entry points: proposals, not implemented events.
Discover → Explore → Experience → Decide → Enrol
MARS as a narrative system
Prepare → Learn → Build → Launch → Work
Not a school that chose Mars as a graphic theme: an academy that uses the journey to Mars as a metaphor for professional transformation. The student enters MARS Academy and begins a mission toward their professional future.
Visual direction
A conventional dark “space website” wouldn’t be enough. The direction moved toward something editorial, contemporary and human, closer to a creative academy than a sci-fi product, with the mission language carried into course materials and communication.
Homepage direction
A homepage built to sell MARS, not every course at once, with a clear hierarchy of paths and modules in place of a flat course catalog.
Student projects
A proposed format for showing portfolio outputs alongside each course: the clearest way to communicate “learn by doing” on the homepage itself.
[ Concept mockup: project names and students are illustrative, not real Academy output. ]
Outcome
The project hasn’t yet reached a final implemented outcome. Its strongest result so far is strategic: the redesign reframed the assignment from “make the website look better” to “make it clear why MARS Academy is worth choosing today.”
Research → Offer → Positioning → Narrative → UX → Visual design, as one connected system.
Want to go deeper into this project? Write to me.
hello@dariozanna.com