ricardo medina

Elysian

Years
2026
Role
Product and design consultant
Disciplines
Positioning, Brand, Web design

A point of view for an AI-native claims company, carried into its story, its brand and its site.

Elysian handles commercial insurance claims for carriers on a platform built around its own AI, founded by a five-time Chief Claims Officer. It had a clear advantage in a hard market and no settled way of saying it. I joined as the design seat, working directly with the CEO, and gave the company one point of view, then designed what carries it.

Highlights

  • Positioning for a company with an advantage and no words for it
  • Authority through restraint, drawn from luxury houses
  • The sales story told as a shift in the industry
  • A site with two ways in and one standard of quality

The seat

Elysian is a third-party administrator, a company that carriers hand their claims to, and it runs those claims with its own adjusters and an AI it built itself. Its founder had been the Chief Claims Officer at five insurers, and the company was built on what she knew from that seat.

It was live with carriers and still working out how to describe itself. The product, the decks and the site each said it a different way, and the market it sells into hears a new AI pitch every week. I took the design seat.

Elysian had a real advantage and no language for it. I gave it a point of view and designed everything that carries it.

A point of view

We started with what the company believed, in a thirteen-slide deck to the leadership: a claim is a promise being tested; the best adjusters already know what to do, they just cannot see everything they need to see, so Elysian built the seeing. It talks about honoring the craft of claims and giving it the tools it always deserved. The voice that follows has four pillars, authoritative, precise, impact and human, and the guidelines show each with a sentence Elysian would say beside one it would not.

The look draws on luxury houses more than on software. The guidelines name what to move away from and what to move towards.

Away fromTowards

Away from → Towards

  1. A SaaS platformEditorial and human
  2. Digital onlyAn emphasis on craft
  3. AI technologyAuthority through restraint

The story a carrier hears

The deck tells the same story on every call: our world became more complex faster than our tools did, every new tool added another silo, and claims is shifting from a set of tasks to decisions made in context, so the system has to understand the file the way an expert does. It is built as a modular system, so a deck for any carrier is assembled from the same slides. It has its own pictures: a slip-and-fall file eighteen months old, 618 documents and 1,386 pages, drawn as a wall of dots, and the middle of a claim drawn as the tangle it is.

The brand

A serif wordmark set large and flat, navy on parchment, classical engraving in two colours with the ferrywoman carrying a claim across, and photographs shot on film in natural light. The guidelines run to twenty-seven pages, from the concept to the collateral, the deck covers and the speaker cards.

01
Elysian's brand colours, navy, charcoal, gray, white and parchment, and three wordmark lockups
02
Elysian's classical engraving illustration style and film-toned photography direction

The site

The site is where the point of view meets a carrier who has not taken the call. Its headline is the product's promise, the quality layer your claims are missing, and the page is built on the two ways in: hand your claims to Elysian, or keep your team and let it review every open file. Under that sit one platform across the four stages of a claim, the results carriers care about, and the ferrywoman at the foot.

Six pages were designed on the same system. A solutions page that gives each of the two products its own screen and the choice between them. A technology page that tells the platform's story, a claim's whole history in one place. A company page that opens on the line built by those who know where claims break, and then the origin: how twenty-five years of watching the same problem go unsolved became a company. And a news template for the coverage a claims audience reads. The solutions and company pages are here, with two of the components that carry the platform.

What Elysian received is one point of view and everything that carries it: the story told on every call, the identity and the site, all saying the same thing with the same restraint.

Delivered in 2026 as a complete system: positioning and voice, the deck system, the brand guidelines and six page designs for the site.

The point of view was worked out with Elysian's CEO and executive team; the platform is built by Elysian's engineers.