Grouper – Brand Evolution
Expertise
Art Direction; Branding; User-Experience Design; Systems Thinking
Deliverables
Optimized Brand System; Revised & Enhanced Identity; Unified Exerperience / UI Pattern System
Overview
As Grouper pivoted into an uncertain future with fewer staff to support the company as a whole, the opportunity to hone / focus our brand & platform presented itself, simplify patterns, and bring a missing sense of energy back into Grouper.
When Grouper established itself as a new brand in 2024, it was done so under a very different business model where we (through your insurance) reimburse you for particiapting in social activities. Fast forward just over a year later, and our business model and our brand positioning no longer made sense. Pivoting to a social platform gave us the opportunity to pivot and energize the brand.
Warmth. Support. Friendship.
As we began to develop the new identity, we centered all the work on the ideas of warmth, support, and friendship. The goal of Grouper was to have this feel like home, to be a comfort but also provide new challenges and opportunities for you in the next stage of your journey. Take what was working, build something studier, and ensure it scales across platforms and devices.
Reduce, Refine, Reuse
As I looked across the brand system and the digital pattern library, I was confronted with a jumbled system. Different teams and different eras were all trying to make their mark, but it left the experience feeling disjointed. Stepping in, I found opportunities to focus the whole of the system, including
- Typography – Shifting from two (expensive, yearly licensed) fonts to an open source family, and updated the entire headline styles to provide better scanibility & readability.
- Color – Updating the overall brand color system to include more logical steps between tints, and introduced new colors while reducing the total number of colors in the system by 40%.
- Patterns – Introducing the theming to our pattern library to keep transitions between brands and platforms as simple as possible, both in the short term for speed-to-market, and for long-term maintenance
- Tickets – As part of this effort, I worked closely with the product team to ensure a smooth development process, including writing tickets and performing all UAT testing. This involved everything from net-new components to reducing the scale of others to deprecation.
This refined system ultimately supported four products: GrouperApp, Hello, GrouperAdmin, and the Marketing Site. While the Marketing Site didn’t directly consume the Storybook patterns, it pulled directly from the styles, ensuring a seamless transition from prospect to member.