T Charleston Portolio - SpotHero Brand Refresh

View project role and accomplishments summary

The Opportunity

As the company grew from a small, engineer-designed company to a larger, UCD-focused company with an improved UX, their marketing brand needed refresh and consolidation to better reflect their fresh perspectives and updated product.

There were inconsistencies in the way products were designed, how products looked, how the company approached their brand internally, and organization around production of their collateral; and my opportunity was to make our system and marketing product more representative, cohesive, efficient, and consistent.

My Role

• UX / Product Design Lead
• Brand Designer
• Photography Creative Director & Manager
• UI / Visual Designer
• Interaction Designer
• Information Architect
• Test Facilitator
• Researcher
• Product Management for UX Projects, initially
• Design QA
• Strategist
• Supervisor of Junior Contractor

Constraints

• Budgetary, resource, and time constraints limited us.
• The SpotHero brand had earned equity and at this early stage of their market appearance, there was concern that an entirely new logo and brand would alienate loyal customers who leaned heavily on logo recognition to find SpotHero parking in the garages.

Accomplishments

✓ Created refreshed and consistent design assets, resulting in greater brand consistency and greater revenue through digital and print marketing
✓ Lead brand workshops and market research to help SpotHero think about and 'find' our brand vision.
✓ Initiated and played an integral part in writing and developing updated mission, vision, and value statements for SpotHero, in order to infuse company values into marketing copy and decision-making
✓ Drove the integration of brand and product quality through quality assurance processes and standards
✓ Designed and developed/coded live style guide and User Traits documents for communication of refreshed brand and best practices, resulting in greater efficiency and consistency
✓ Lead creative visual direction for marketing product and the integration of product and brand, working closely with internal teams and coaching junior contractors and interns
✓ Consolidated print efforts through improved efficiencies and vendor contacts, and nurtured new successful relationships with vendors; resulting in greater efficiency, consistency, and higher quality product
✓ Designed interior of new office with limited financial and employee resources, immersing employees in vibrant brand

Brand Workshops, Market/Product Research, Visual Exploration

I was hired at a point when the company needed a refreshed, consolidated, and user-centered, market-optimized identity with more dimension and personality that could genuinely relate/appeal to our customers. We also needed to create, understand, and live our brand and company values so that these values could be infused into everything we delivered. I held Brand Workshops with execs and other employees, in which we created a brand personality using what we learned of the market and using the personality attributes of a DISC Assessment. From this I was able to create a persona of our brand as well as a User Traits & Appeals packet, outlining our market/user traits and what appeals to them. I worked with the VP of Marketing and the Head of Customer Service to discover and write our company mission, vision, and values. In prep, I researched our market and our market's user habits through pyschographic studies in tandem with Kellogg University, employee and internal interviews, studied the user interviews and user testing.

Low-Fidelity Style Tiles

I designed these quick style tiles, exploring various new styles that would maintain our brand equity but offer a slightly updated personality based on market and user findings and internal brand preferences. Ultimately we decided on a bright, refreshed blue and yellow, friendly rounded attributes, no photo filters and vibrant, realistic photography because it best represented our product and our market.

Logo Refresh

A slight update to the logo to maintain brand equity and make it more usable and modern

The SpotHero brand had earned equity and at this early stage of their market appearance, there was concern that an entirely new logo and brand would alienate loyal customers who leaned heavily on logo recognition to find SpotHero parking in the garages. Budgetary and time constraints also limited our amount of effort. I used authentic design techniques and removed skeumorphic effects, leveraged my new fresh blue, and created a more balanced brandmark/wordmark.

Updated Marketing Collateral

With an updated brand, comes new collateral. I created new collateral to better match the needs of our internal teams and customers, like branded posters, stationery, pens, business cards, apparel, signage, and more.

New Website & Native App

I designed a new responsive website and native app, based on research and testing, leveraging the refreshed brand I created; resulting in higher engagement, fewer customer service calls, and greater conversion.

SpotHero UX Overhaul of Web & App - Full Project Details >

Live Style Guide

I designed, coded, and wrote a live style guide to communicate refreshed brand; resulted in greater efficiency for all departments, lesser burden for Marketing, higher engagement for customers, and more brand consistency.

Life at a startup means people do lots of jobs. Our Marketing team was small and did not have any designers on staff, but were still designing collateral, as were other departments such as Sales and Customer Service. Because of this, there were major inconsistencies in our marketing products which created doubt and confusion for our customers. In order to create consistency and a cohesive updated brand for all, I designed and developed a new color palette, typography, photography style, etc and then developed a live style guide that would help other designers follow our brand guidelines. This resulted in greater efficiency, consistency, and productivity.

Signage

I created design consistency and printing efficiency, and updated content for our garage, lot, and equipment signage; resulting in fewer customer service complaints and less burden for other departments.

In order to decrease the burden for Sales and Account Managers (who were responsible for creating signage in their region) and to align with our refreshed brand and clarify parking instructions for customers, I designed new signs, created templates for other departments to use, organized and consolidated print efforts by creating partnerships with fewer and better print shops and shipment companies, and created a new, more efficient process for other departments to create, print, and receive new signage. Our new signs and stickers resulted in higher engagement. For example, the sticker shown at top right resulted in 95% fewer customer service calls/complaints about that garage.

Interior Design (for fun!)

I designed the interior of the new office, with an eager organization and a tiny budget, which resulted in happier employees and an infused brand.

I was given the opportunity to fully immerse our employees in my newly created brand, so with a deadline looming, and with the help of $1,000 and an equally passionate office manager, I designed and labored on the interior of our new office. I matched our interior paint with the new brand colors, created posters, phrases, and artwork, that represented our values and our work ethic throughout the office, and I found and placed artwork and decor. It was a fun project that I did in my off-time and was met with excited and pride by employees, and was even featured in a local publication.