Overview
As Grouper pivoted into an uncertain future, we took the opportunity to strip everything down to the core, doubling down on what was working, discarded what wasn’t, and inject a sense of energy back into Grouper.
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 sturdier, 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 from different eras building for a future that never came to fruition, resulting in a myriad of unused (or dead) patterns and components, and a needlessly complex Storybook library. Nothing was considered sacred.
Highlights from this effort include
- Typography – Shifted the core type system from two families that never quite worked together (and required expensive, yearly renewals) to a single open source family. This gave me the opportunity to revisit the entire type system, including restructuring the whole of the headline system to provide better scannability & readability.
- Color – Updated the overall brand color system to include a new / refined color system for the brand with logical steps between tints, and in the process reduced 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 by Grouper, GrouperAdmin, and our marketing site. While the marketing (WordPress) site didn’t directly consume our Storybook patterns, I worked with engineering to ensure the translation of the Storybook patterns were as seamless as possible, ensuring our members enjoyed a constant brand experience throughout their journey.