Infusing brand experience into product
A brand's essence unfolds through a cohesive assembly of components, crafting a coherent narrative across every interaction. These elements encompass emotions, anticipations, encounters, actions, perspectives, and narratives, all converging to influence a consumer's product selection.
Translating this distinct personality into a product experience demands a methodical and harmonized strategy. The challenge lies in seamlessly embedding a brand's identity within the product realm, infusing the visual layer, user interface (UI), and overall experience with its unique personality.
My Role
Central Design Manager (Brand + EDS)
The Team
Brand Design, Systems Design, Engineering
Company
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI)
The Challenge
Orchestrating seamless brand translation between the brand and design systems teams, optimizing cross-functional scope, collaboration efficiencies, implementation and final documentation.
Focus + Leadership
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Ensured smooth collaboration between the brand and design systems teams. This inclusive approach enabled diverse perspectives to converge, resulting in a unified vision and execution strategy.
Efficiency Optimization
Streamlined processes to ensure a distinct and resonant product experience. Maximized team efficiencies while preserving the integrity of the brand's identity by providing a clear direction and resources.
Promotion & Socialization
Promoting and reinforcing team narrative and purpose across the organization to foster understanding, awareness, and transparency at all levels.
Defining Brand Experience
Championed the need for a brand experience team by highlighting their vital role in embedding the brand within the product. This involved raising awareness, sharing benefits, and defining a branded visual system. Through design sprints, cross-functional teamwork, and close brand-design collaboration, the team ensured seamless brand integration, driving consistency and boosting user engagement.
Brand Promise
Anchoring the team around the brand promise was a critical compass in our work. It served as a guide, ensuring that every design decision supported the brand's identity and met customer expectations. This alignment helped maintain consistency and integrity across all product offerings.
Brand Personality
Defining a Brand Star
The brand experience team spearheaded and developed a final mapping of our brand star showcasing the many facets of our brand tone. This brand personality became the foundation of how we express ourselves in the world and to our audience.
Together, the brand and systems team championed the utilization and importance of the brand star to ensure the right translation into our product experience.
Brand Equalizer
Developed a brand equalizer framework to allow us to visualize a brand's personality traits when it’s dialed up or down across the journey.
We used this tool as a guardrail to explore visual and verbal design territories, as well as products, services, and experiences within a brand’s Personality.
Carefully Crafting Themes
Translating print guidelines into a digital interface
Ensured the print guidelines were digitally compliant and accessible across the visual system, ultimately defining the first branded theme.
Hello Spot Illustrations
Defining a new product asset
The initial brand guidelines came with assets that weren’t easily applicable in a product atmosphere and defining spot illustrations helped bridge the gap between marketing and product needs ensuring the optimal brand expression.
System Considerations
Product Explorations
The project overview page was identified as a strong candidate for brand exploration as this was an integrel part of the learning platform with most of the experiences stemming from this core page.
“Ashley has vast expertise as an innovator, a visual artist, a brand leader, and knows how to exercise all of those for the success of a design system and product organization.”
— Systems Product Designer, CZI
Before & After
Systems + Brand Together
The design systems and brand team worked in parallel to combine defined templates and components to infuse brand layers into the learning platform. This further helped to solidify branded objects within this ecosystem.
Results
Brand Framework
A systematic framework emerged, serving as a blueprint for future brand-to-product translations, fostering efficient and effective processes.
Evolved Visual Identity
The visual layer was meticulously curated to resonate with the brand's aesthetic and tone. Colors, typography, illustrations, and iconography were aligned to evoke brand familiarity and resonance.
Brand UI Components
The UI design was meticulously crafted to mirror the brand's voice. Buttons, layouts, interactions, and animations were fine-tuned to authentically echo the brand's unique style.