GoSpotCheck Brand Refresh

GoSpotCheck was a high-growth, B2B SaaS business from Denver, CO. In 2018, there was a need to refine the brand to better resonate with enterprise-level customers and unify product + brand. I led creative, managing both internal + external teams to elevate the brand without losing hard-earned brand equity. I also executed on design from smaller projects like our banner ads, to the biggest like our brand identity.

Lessons Learned

This brand refresh was a big one for us. We’d done smaller updates in the past, but nothing as monumental as this (which also naturally happens the bigger your company grows). The biggest thing I learned was that you can’t do it all. No matter how well you plan & communicate, there’s simply not enough time to do one huge reveal.

So instead, we prioritized assets based on a matrix of audience impact, market visibility, cost, and level of effort. This meant projects like our marketing website & logo updates came first, and less visible assets, like a one-pager template, came later on.

Success

With any brand-centric project, there are successes you can measure, and some you simply can’t. Externally, we saw a tangible increase in our inbound leads on the website. Internally, employees had a much better sense of pride, understanding, and consistency when using the brand. And for my brand design & product design teams, we had clarity and more focus in who we were and how that should be conveyed.

In 2020, GoSpotCheck was acquired by FORM.com, who bought the brand name and identity along with the core products.

Deliverables

Art Direction
Branding
Strategy

Internal Team

Nicole Askari [Design]
Naomi Paskowitz [Design + Illustration]
Ryan Burney [Design + Dev]
Marketing & Product Design teams

External Team

Studio Mast [Lead Art Direction + Design]
Friends & Lovers Photography [Photography]

The Logo

The centerpiece for the full brand refresh: our logo. When we worked with Studio Mast, we’d made the ask that the logo be left alone. But when you work with experts, they help you see things you may not have seen yourself… the logo at that time was convoluted. The “spotcheck” symbol was directly inside the logo as the “o” in “Go”. They proposed pulling it out, so that it could have better brand equity on its own, allow the wordmark of “GoSpotCheck” to do the same, and all the while increase legibility. Great call.

I designed the original logo, and Studio Mast did the update shown here.

A House of Brands

With the revised parent logo, we then carried that through our sub brands, as shown below. It was essential that every sub brand logo felt within the same family, and everything was unified through our updated color palette. Most of these logos had existed previously, but we got them on the same grid, same typography and same master color palette.

The Brand Guidelines

In my role as Creative Director, I felt like I was doing my best when the brand was able to live on its own, without me policing fellow teammates on proper usage all the time. Well, like it or not, sometimes people require guidance, and a brand is no exception. We worked with Studio Mast to develop brand guidelines, and then my internal team created a microsite at brand.gospotcheck.com to house them in a more accessible and shareable format.

The guidelines were meticulously detailed, as we had a lot of stakeholders needing to be enabled in being 1. on brand and 2. not hindered by always having to get approval from the Brand Design team.

A new website… but make it in 3 weeks during the holidays.

At the end of 2018, my full team – which included both creatives and markerters – was tasked with designing, building and launching a completely new website to premier our new brand positioning. Some feel it’s a cliché to show software as screenshots in phone and laptop mockups, but it’s also crystal clear what you provide. We showed clean product shots, interweaving our bright color palette, illustrations and brand patterns throughout to ensure brand personality came through.

We built the site on Webflow so that anyone could update it on the fly without our sole developer. As of Q4 2019, you can see the website as it was designed live here.

Deck templates

Never the most glamorous projects, but boy are they crucial tools throughout commercial organizations (sales, CS, c-suite, ops, marketing, etc.). At GSC, the whole company was asked to use Keynote, a request from the founders, so I created our hefty master templates directly in Keynote, and circulated through Box so we could maintain a single source of truth. We would then treat the templates like a development project, circling back now and again to fix bugs and provide updates. Use the arrows to view different layout examples:

Product UI

Custom illustrations

A few years into my career at GSC, I had an overwhelming sense of imposter syndrome and so I did what any young CD would do… I googled “how to be a creative director”. Through all the silly videos, I found one with a bunch of amazing interviews and one quote struck me like lightning:

Hire people who are better than you.

And so I did just that. I was lucky to have an extremely talented team of employees, including our in-house illustrator, Naomi. With the brand refresh, we worked together to identify a unique style for our hero and spot illustrations. Here are a few examples:

Illustrations (by Naomi Paskowitz)

Branded Headshots

Very early on during my time at GSC, I decided our team could benefit from branded headshots. At that time, we were a very small team and networking, largely via LinkedIn, was crucial to customer and employee acquisition. Branded headshots accomplished a number of things for us:

Presented a unified front, that while subtle, was memorable during motions like enterprise sales outreach.
Provided our team, many of whom were just beginning their careers, with professional-grade headshots, previously unavailable to them.
Added yet another touchpoint to maintain consistency for our brand everywhere we could.

GoSpotCheck employee headshots across LinkedIn

The small projects matter too: banner ads

Banner ads are not my favorite thing to create. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a brand designer who loves them. But they provide challenging constraints and allows you to test your brand in ways you would not otherwise consider. Will your logo read at 250px wide? How do you convey abstract software in one static image? Does our messaging resonate?

For the record, on this set of banner ads, we actually did see a rise in click-through rate (CTR) and got higher than average lead volume for our business development reps (turns out GSC’s audience appreciated personalization).