Having helped grow the company from less than 10 people to over 100, I took the GoSpotCheck brand seriously. As Creative Director, I led the brand's final refresh, setting the brand up for success and eventual acquisition.
This brand refresh was a big one for us. It was the company's final push to button up the identity in preparation for a hopeful exit event. I'd rebranded us before. In fact, our 2014 rebrand felt more significant in a lot of ways as it was then that I redid our logo to launch the Spotcheck icon, and we made the call to not change the company name.
But we were missing something fundamental. Our brand was still mostly aesthetics. We had clear discrepancies between product and brand. Our core messaging was all over the board. Typical brand identity scaling problems. So in 2018, we decided to take all the years of hard work from my brand and product design teams and distill it into something polished, sophisticated, and clear.
At that time, I'd never led such a big brand refresh myself. I knew I had to bring in experts. So we did. I brought in world-class branding agency Studio Mast, who led us through the full project. I oversaw our side's Creative Direction to ensure we still felt like us and my team led execution. Studio Mast led art direction, strategy, and provided our key assets including the refined logo and brand guidelines.
The final brand identity was based in our newly aligned mission statement and company values. My internal creative and marketing teams gained clarity in how the brand should be used, which dramatically improved efficiency when building new projects. We also increased brand trust and appeal with our target audiences, customers and investors alike.
This was a masterclass in Brand Design: a subtractive art form, like sculpture, where the thing is there... you just have to strip away the excess to get down to it.
In 2020, GoSpotCheck was acquired by FORM.com, who bought the brand as we built it from this brand refresh.
Graphic Design, Brand Identity
Creative & Art Direction, Design Strategy, People & Project Management, Design Operations, Creative Leadership
UI Design, Art direction, vendor sourcing, and project management
I couldn't have done anything without my immensely talented in-house design team. Thanks to Nicole Askari as Lead Designer, Naomi Paskowitz as Designer/Illustrator, and Ryan Burney as Designer/Developer.
And another big shout out to Marketing, Product Design, and Leadership.
Thanks to Travis & Jake from Studio Mast for teaching me so much about this art form we call Design.
And since the garage days, big thanks to Chelsey Pas at Friends & Lovers Photography for literal years of photography.
The original logo, from before my time, left something to be desired. The brand we built internally over the next few years was edgier and more sophisticated. It was, well, cooler. And so we needed an identity that reflected that.
I created the newer logo 2014 logo shown here in 2014 but it wasn't until the 2018 brand refresh that Studio Mast suggested pulling the icon out from the wordmark. This simple move gave the logo so much more depth! For greater contrast, you can see the original logo pre-2014, compared to the final logo created in partnership with Studio Mast.
When Em, Founder of 1-800-PeopleOps, decided to create her own people operations agency, she knew she wanted a brand that was the perfect balance between playful & professional. Over one quarter, I partnered with her to bring this new brand to life.
