Preface

When I joined Rocket Lawyer in 2015 as a marketing designer I noticed a need for better communication amongst our in-house design team. At the time Rocket Lawyer had a UX style guide that applied to the product, a print style guide, and a web style guide. However these guides did not include newer marketing materials such as email, landing pages, social media, or illustrations because the marketing styles were still open ended and had not yet been defined.

There was an opportunity to begin to explore how to communicate brand styles better within our in-house team. Initially the idea manifested as a marketing assets folder to dump all of the visual designs different teams created over time. Later, the marketing assets folder idea morphed into a marketing style guide which would define styles for customer facing marketing objectives.

Since these efforts were already in motion, as a team we decided to audit our brand and refresh one of our most inconsistent areas, illustration style, icon styles, and colors.

Brand Refresh

Today, Rocket Lawyer now has a brand style guide that has begun to better define its brand styles and attempt to manage brand inconsistencies while being flexible enough that any designer would be able to create visual assets inline with this guide. Here’s the story of how the in-house team approached a brand refresh starting with a focus on defining its illustration style as a team by:

1. Creating a group illustration exercise

2. Individually exploring design styles

3. Sharing our individual discoveries and voting as a team

4. Applying styles practically in marketing materials

5. Adding new colors that would compliment the existing palette

6. Pulling it all together in a brand guideline (explanation coming soon)

Defining a goal

As a team we approached this brand refresh by identifying where our website uses imagery and illustration. By auditing our marketing materials we were able to identify inconsistent styles and common themes and images used across the site and marketing campaigns. We also revisited the themes of the Rocket Lawyer Brand to ensure that the updates would be consistent with the existing definitions of the Brand.

Ultimately we defined the goal of our exercise:

”Create a unique and flexible illustration style guide that can evolve as Rocket Lawyer grows—a visually appealing style that works across character, spot, icon, and hero illustrations. Illustrations should make it easier for customers to understand difficult concepts, make the subject matter more relatable, and give designers more flexibility. The illustrations should feel consistent, like they came from the same source, and can be easily duplicated by each member of the design team.”

Each designer in our team individually researched and explored new illustration styles and color pallets that would compliment our existing brand colors. We focused on images of rockets, documents, hands, devices, and people.

Here are some of the ideas and concepts I explored.

Icons

We agreed to pursue one of the styles presented that would bring some dimension to the marketing pages. The designer who created this style also defined stylistic choices so that other members of the team could replicate the style. We then as a group divided the illustration categories and marketing topics that would required updated iconography.

Color exploration and application

I volunteered to do some color exploration to add some fresh colors to our minimal color palette. Since our brand colors consisted mainly of red, orange, and neutral grays I explored warm and cool tones that would compliment our existing palette, while adding more color variety that would be restricted to marketing material use.