GoSpotCheck Brand Refresh

GoSpotCheck is a high-growth, B2B SaaS business out of Denver, CO. In 2018, we needed to update 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 for some of the smallest projects like our banner ads, and the biggest like our sub brand identities.

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 frequented 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 team, we had clarity and more focus in who we were and how that should be conveyed.

Deliverables

Art Direction
Branding
Strategy

The Team

Studio Mast [Lead Art Direction + Design]
Nicole Askari [Design]
Naomi Paskowitz [Design + Illustration]
Ryan Burney [Design + Dev]

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.

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)

Brand Guidelines

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).