Scope
Rebranding and marketing
website redesign
Tools
Figma, Adobe Illustrator,
Photoshop & Wordpress
Role
UX/UI Designer
& Creative Direction
About
Reach is a tech startup founded in 2019 that focuses on compensating users for the data they share with popular consumer brands. The app works by allowing users to connect with their favorite brands and then asks them to engage in various types of activities and surveys to then be paid in Reach dollars for their participation. This method of engagement allows users to consciously choose which data they'd like to share and gives brands detailed insights into what their consumers like and want. Users can then spend their Reach Dollars just like regular dollars to earn rewards for sharing their data.
Original Website Direction
When I first joined the Reach team, they had an existing marketing website that had been created. However, they expressed a need for the site to be redesigned to not only be more compelling but also more product focused. The original hero images shown below lacked photography that felt genuine and relatable to the targeted consumer.
Updating Brand Guidelines
To address the need to update the photography direction, I did a deep dive into research to see how indirect competitors used photography on their websites. I also looked at popular millennial brands such as Target to pick out trends that could be applied to the Reach website. After compiling my research and presenting it to the team, we decided to go in a direction called "Lifestyle Editorial" photography. This includes images of relatable and diverse models, shown in natural poses. We also went in a direction where backgrounds were simple, which helps to better showcase brands that would eventually partner with Reach on their platform.
Additional branding elements such as icons and illustrations were also outlined in a brand guide. This helped to start to refine the design language and unite both the web based design assets with the existing app components.
Social Media
I was also tasked with thinking through how the new branding elements could be applied to various social media content creation. I narrowed in on Instagram, which is one of the most popular social media platforms used by millennials. By thinking through what the Instagram "grid" may look like, I used various design language elements to create visual content that our marketing team could post.
Marketing Emails
I also applied the new brand guides to welcome and sign up emails that our team would send to new members when they sign up for the platform. This helped create a consistent and cohesive design language for various content across different platforms. We utilized fun and colorful illustrations and animations along with a consistent color for way-finding.
Landing Page Design
I worked closely with the content writers to establish what copy was needed on the Reach landing page. The homepage needed to speak to both potential consumers as well as potential brand partners. I also wanted to showcase the photography direction we established as well as the illustrations and animations we had created.
The landing page utilized an animated, rotating hero image that changed to show different consumers engaging in different activities as well as animated headers that expressed multiple benefits to joining the Reach platform. The rotating hero images opened a window for not only implementing new imagery when brands joined the platform but could also act as a way to provide visitors with "bit-sized" content that highlighted these benefits of the app.
Additional Website Pages
After establishing the landing page designs, I built out additional pages with the development team. Some of these pages included an "About Reach" page as well as a blog layout. It was important to establish consistent design patterns across various pages. The original website design did not do this, so I carefully combed through all pages to unify typography, imagery, and way-finding colors. I also conducted an audit to ensure that all pages were properly responsive.
Reflection
The work that was put into the Reach marketing and website redesign was truly a team effort. I was fortunate to be given the freedom and trust to provide a creative direction, but the engineering and marketing teams made my designs come to life to provide the company with a beautifully modern and informative website. The website has evolved since my time working for Reach, but the general art and social media direction has stayed the same and has proven to be successful for not only the company's brand image, but also consumers and brand partners alike.