From Jan 22’ - July 23’, I worked at Revolent as the Senior Designer - driving creativity, style and consistency through its branding, we worked to create something we were all proud of.
My core responsibility was to manage and deliver all aspects of the company’s creative pipeline. This includes working with the Senior Leadership Team (and wider departments) to develop their foundational concepts and perform / schedule research to inform the conceptualisation of our designs before developing and implementing said designs on a company-wide basis.
From working on the social media posts, to building their website from the ground up. whether it’s Building and developing the brand, creating visually powerful slide decks or Anything that uses colours or shapes. it has been across my desk in some shape or capacity.
the goal is to elevate the brand and create something that is effective, eye-catching and welcoming for the end user.
here is a glimpse into some of the wonderful things we have made
(re)Building the brand
Speaking with the Leadership Team, Revolent Group recently had a reshuffle of the internal structuring, had welcomed new members to the board, and had developed a new internal strategy for the fiscal year. As a result, they wanted the companies’ branding to better reflect their new vision, as the old branding, while strong, did not match the tone or style they wanted to perceive in order to solidify and grow their position within the market. With my team, this project began initially with project scope management and market research.
In terms of project scope management, we identified the following:
All aspects of the branding that would require updating / modification
Target and market research
Prioritisation of branding dev (ex: core branding, website, white papers, sales decks, guidelines, document templates, business cards, tone-of-voice, email signatures, uniforms, office branding, legal docs, branding collateral, etc)
Team delegation branding dev (assigning workloads, schedules, and deadlines to midweight and junior designers within my team and wider departments)
Time allocation for development of the branding
Intermittent time allocation for sign-off / amend stages of the project from myself, the Head of Design, and the SLT
Final sign off
Branding rollout
Company-wide briefing / training on branding and usage
And in terms of research, it was approached in the form of 2 pillars: Internal and Market Analysis. As mentioned, it was vital to have ongoing discussions with the SLT to ensure our development of the branding was in-line and representative of Revolent Group's values and vision, while ensuring that we could also identify strengths and weaknesses before taking the next step in the company’s future without undoing the previous designer’s past steps.
This formed our internal research, which allowed myself and my team to identify potential issues and build that into the project timeline. One example would be that during our research, we identified that the previously designed branding was not WCAG 2.2 compliant, and the website had not been built with accessibility in mind. As a result, a large majority of the company's core branding needed to be majorly adjusted or redesigned completely.
The second pillar was aimed at looking externally, identifying the market and the competitors within it. Identifying their strengths and weaknesses, what is being done well, what gaps exist and how we could use that information to pivot our branding to help achieve our 2023 business goals
We also worked incredibly closely with our external vendors and sister companies to ensure that our branding was complimentary and to avoid any steps that could be conflicting, superfluous or clash in any particular type of way. A vital aspect of our research was to ensure we were understanding and sensitive to the geographical climate, ecology, and traditions in order to better represent the all-inclusive aspect of our company’s beliefs.
As this several month long project was inevitably a large undertaking for our team, we had to ensure that we worked efficiently, deliberately, and to the schedule accordingly. As the Lead Designer for the company and lead on the project - the responsibility of project success fell to myself.
Using what was learned from the scoping and research phases, I was able to effectively plot out, signpost and deliver this enormous project, while ensuring the quality of our work was of the highest standard we could possibly deliver, while considering any potential effects to my team (maintaining well-being, minimising burnout, etc) or other projects and deliverables that my team is also responsible for on their day-to-day.
While myself and my team worked to our outlined schedule to build out the visual side of the brand, I was also liaising with our wider departments including our HR, Legal, Content, SEO, and other departments where necessary to have a complete revision of everything branding related. As mentioned previously, everything was revisited. Content was rewritten across the board to match updated tone-of-voice, which would then be influenced by departments such as HR and Legal, to be then influenced again by our Search team for our web content, paid advertising, and online presence.
This project was a vast undertaking of multiple departments and talented individuals to ensure that the correct pieces were in place at the right time and navigate any potential issues. The final scope of the project was an estimated 8 months delivery time from initial start to rollout, but we were able to deliver and mark the project as complete at the 6 month mark.
Outside of our large-scale projects such as the corporate rebranding, my role of Acting Lead Designer responsibilities falls towards managing my team - ensuring they have their professional needs met, the resources they require and ensuring they are on the correct path with the projects they have been assigned.
