All my work at Asana led me to the launch of our new brand, new identity, and new design. I believe this project is the best work of my career. I not only designed my butt off, but I also got to help build the team that helped me make all these great things.
The first part of the project was defining what type of company we want Asana to be and then perceived as. We then defined the attributes that would be the pillars of all our design decisions. Whenever there were subjective decisions or goals that were unclear, we asked ourselves, "Does this represent our brand attributes?"
From there, I helped marketing create brand positioning and worked with our branding agency on our identity. We rallied around the three-dot triangle for several reasons.
1. It represented our brand attributes very well. It was purposeful, it could be fun and quirky, the glow made it approachable, and the shape is empowering.
2. We liked that it borrowed from our previous logo and was an abstract A.
3. We liked the story it told. The minimum amount of people to make up a team is three. The center glow keeps the three connected and inflow and balance.
After we had an identity, we brought all the designs back in-house and worked on brand shapes, typography, gradients, motion, illustration, and photography styles. With those assets, we could start building all kinds of marketing materials like our website, advertising, new user experiences, email marketing templates, and countless others. The product design team could finish our product redesign for web and mobile products.
All the screenshots you are seeing on the left are from the Asana Brandbook. You can download the PDF of the Brandbook here.
Other resources on our redesign:
Brand New's review of the new Asana logo
Do Great Things Together - Asana Brand Video
Introducing Asana's New Look - Asana Blog
Collaborators: Amanda Linden, Jessica Strelioff, Amanda Buzard, Micah Daigle, Vanessa Koch, Emily Kramer, Moving Brands, and many others.
While we were working on our complete visual redesign of Asana, we wanted to make a brand video that would introduce Asana to the world and re-introduce Asana to existing customers or those who gave up on us in the past.
We wanted to show in an artistic way what Asana was and hopefully, appeal to the viewer's emotions and recall all those times when collaboration just flows.
All the motion graphics were done by the critically acclaimed studio, Giant Ant. I worked on crafting the story, concept, and Creative Direction with Emily Kramer.
This is the third version of Asana.com I've created and by far the best. Jessica Strelioff and Amanda Buzard did most of the heavy lifting. It's so full of energy and clarity of vision. I believe it celebrates our new brand well.
I do want to work on injecting a bit more emotion into the pages. Also, spend time user testing the sign-up flow. My hunch is the main loading page may be too distracting with the product and device shot, but we will test it.
At Asana we wanted a great customer marketing campaign to celebrate our amazing customers who have their teams doing great things using Asana. The campaign allowed all teams to get involved and share their story about how they were using Asana.
During the campaign, we gave away prize packs featuring goods and coupons for services from our customers.
The other nice thing about a customer marketing campaign is that your customers will promote the fact that you are promoting them, so we definitely wanted the campaign to have a large social push and reach.
The design concept we came up with was a Madlib style. Asana has so many customers and use-cases, that highlighting those two things was important. I wanted potential customers to think, "I didn't know you could do that with Asana?"
The fun thing about this campaign is that we produced so many pieces in so many channels: microsite, Twitter, Facebook, ads, billboards, transit ads, and even swag boxes.
Collaborators: Jessica Strelioff, Amanda Buzard, and Emily Kramer
With the rise of mobile and the competition of the check-in, we wanted to create some stickers small business owners could use for their stores and restaurants. I think the most clever part of this sticker was that one side of the sticker when you enter tells the user to tell their friends where they are. We found most Facebook users had no idea why they'd want to "check-in" somewhere. The other side of the sticker said, "Like us on Facebook." The previous stickers had "Like us" on both sides. However, why would a user Like the business before even trying them? So we reminded the user to Like the business on the way out.
NOTE: This is technically 3 stickers in one. Front, back, and then a black sticker in the middle so, the front and back would not bleed.
EXTRA NOTE: The photo on the left was taken this week (November 2015). I made these in 2011, so 4 years for a sticker means good design and good quality!
Leading up to Facebook's first conference for advertisers and marketers called fMC, we wanted to give attendees some inspiration from brands that were doing great things and getting great results. So I compiled our success stories and created a collection of cards that we printed and compiled into a collection. Why cards? The plan was to print hundreds of these success cards and then a sales executive could compile cards they thought would relate to the company they were visiting the best. We also made Wild Cards. The Wild Cards featured internal posters that demonstrated Facebook's culture. I really wanted to emphasize the results and numbers that our brands were getting. The knock-on Facebook at the time was that there were no real, trackable results. This was partly true as we grew the business, but the results were very good.
I of course made a website featuring these cards. I built the site with Erik Vorhes, a front-end developer. At the time the site was pretty cutting-edge. First off, it was responsive pretty early in that craze and we did HTML5 card flipping and text animation. I'm still pretty psyched about how the cards and the site turned out.
