Building brand recognition & trust through websites
My work at Newsela started with a re-brand and complete website overhaul. Working with The Working Assembly an agency based out of New York I provided brand and web design direction for the initial build. After the website rolled out, I worked to ensure consistent brand during growth, a warm-hand off to the product itself (to ensure they looked connected), and optimizing the website for our marketing team and user’s needs.
Below You’ll find some projects I worked on, and my process
Role: Creative Director & Designer
Worked with: I provided direction for agency work for Newsela’s initial site redesign, and then supported the continued development and brand with an internal team (Content, Product, Design, SEO, Ops).
Process
Research & Planning
Design research and data marking is crucial to any website design. Knowing who your target audience is and what their behaviors are is important to creating a beautiful website that actually works. Typically I review our brand and marketing research, and any website data we might have available to make educated decisions or intentional A/B testing moments. I actually talk about integrating data into design in this blog post.
Similarly knowing our website goals, tech stack and limitations up front can help streamline design from the get go. For example - if accessibility and mobile-first design is important, specific tactics need to be factored in before design starts. Fun fact about me: I worked as a designer/developer for years.
Wires & Flow charts
Before any finalized design - getting rapid fire flow charts and wireframes out into the world is a great way to get stakeholders aligned on roughly where things are, and what prominence and importance everything is without getting caught up in how things look.
Flow charts give designers a sense of place and where in the story we are, it’s important to have an idea of what our viewer may have seen and experienced already and visually prioritize new information.
Design - Brand & Usability are King
Every aspect of a website design should support brand. There can be special flavors of brand for unique campaigns - but brand always needs to be recognizable and fundamentally consistent.
Iconography, Illustration, and Design system fundamentals like menus, buttons, and type are all vehicles for your brand and should be looked at carefully.
Keeping this strong foundation helps users feel like they’re in the right place, helps them recognize your products in the wild, and gives you opportunities to catch folks attention in future campaigns with planned diversion.
I work with my team in collaborative sprints and brainstorms for this stage.
Refresh & Test with real-time Data
After any design is launched and tested, I return to data. I check in periodically to see if our estimates were right, if we need to fine-tune a specific page or area, or to see if we’ve saturated our market and need to try something exciting and new! This is an ongoing process that is typically done best in a collaborative way with Data, SEO, and Marketing teams.