Brand portal
• Launched searchable brand portal as a central source for all brand guidelines and assets
• Portal helped scale design resources across the company, empowering employees to champion the brand. It also accelerated the onboarding process for new hires, freelancers, and agencies
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Creative director, team lead
OBJECTIVE
Contentful was growing so rapidly (from 300 to 500+ employees in one year) that my design team was struggling to support the surging number of requests. We prioritized projects that drove the business – unfortunately, that meant other teams were often left without design support, or that the design team would have to pause their work to respond to these requests.
We needed a way to empower employees to champion the brand themselves, which meant giving them access to brand assets, along with the training and guidelines they would need to use them.
1. RESEARCH, REVIEW & CONTRACT
While spearheading the project, I worked with our internal Brand Council team – consisting of Brand, Website, Product, and Content representatives – to review and provide a vendor recommendation. We chose Frontify, which was one of the few portal options that met all our criteria.
I presented our reco to the CMO and got the sign-off for budget. From there, we initiated security reviews and contract sign-off with the various stakeholders.
2. IMPLEMENTATION
Populating the brand portal required coordination between multiple functions. I worked with my design team, plus the Website, and Content teams to divide up the work and document which team was contributing what elements.
3. SOFT LAUNCH
Roughly a month before release, we did a soft launch with select teams to test the UI/UX and evaluate any pain points they were experiencing.
4. FULL LAUNCH + TRAINING
The company-wide launch featured live & recorded training across multiple time zones, plus full documentation that was included in the new hire onboarding process for all future employees (also accessible by current employees).
5. IMPACT + RESULTS
The brand portal was launched to great enthusiasm across the company. Since the launch, the design team has seen a significant decrease in requests for non business-critical designs, which has freed us to focus on our priorities. We have also seen a dramatic increase in the quality of assets produced around the organization (i.e.: presentations, employee assets, etc.) and have received and overflow of positive feedback from our colleagues across the company.
The brand portal has also allowed us to scale the brand externally. Onboarding new freelancers and agencies used to require lots of hand-holding and review rounds. Now, with our robust style guide and media library, we are able to scale the brand’s consistency across channels both internally and externally, improving our overall efficiency and quality across the board.