RingCentral | Brand System
A showcase of the systems and applications derived from a global brand refresh.
Creative Strategy
Brand + Systems Design
Creative Direction
Team Management
Challenge
Upon starting at RingCentral, one of my primary duties was to take the visual rebrand currently in development and expand and apply the look across all customer touchpoints. As a global company that leveraged a myriad of strategic partnerships, we required thoughtful design thinking to strike a balance between brand consistency and asset flexibility as we rolled out the refreshed look.
Process
The Creative team worked diligently to produce brand elements that resonated with our audience and considered the needs of our cross-functional partners from marketing, sales, product, events, and beyond. Any sound brand design system must have thoughtful guidelines to ensure the brand team, contract partners, and the company at large feel empowered to utilize the brand elements properly. Here is a showcase of some of the key brand system guidelines I helped create and implement and the application of those systems across RingCentral's marketing channels.
General Design System
After any significant brand refresh, there are inevitably learnings about refining and improving upon a newly minted design system. RC's Brand Book 2.0 was just that—an opportunity to update the design system after some time in-market.
Photography System
Stock imagery can often suck. Custom photography can be cost-prohibitive. We built a process and established a style guide that managed these two paths and provided the company with an image library that was ownable and updatable.
Custom Brand Photography
Partnering with the talented folks at Cinco Design, CentralJournal was spun up to provide bespoke lifestyle photography across all our marketing channels. Each CJ issue release focused on particular themes and narratives that helped support product launches, key value props, or gaps in branded content needs.
Device Photo Library
Finding good in-situ device photography can be painful. We worked with Cinco to build a library of custom device assets that departments could use across all channels and, more importantly, across all aspect ratios, giving us more bang for our buck.
Illustration System
After establishing an initial illustration style with the talented team at Stout, we looked to refine the system. We set some guidelines around expanding the illustration library with our capable team of in-house designers.
WSJ Custom Content
RingCentral collaborated with the Wall Street Journal to produce a Paid Program. They adopted our existing illustration style to produce web page and video content that laddered up to one of our evergreen campaigns.
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Content Materials System
As a thought leader in the market, RingCentral produces a lot of content for several audiences. Utilizing our library of brand assets, the creative team created guidelines that integrated content materials into other marketing outreach and helped customers quickly identify relevancy.
Outcome
While updating design systems is an ongoing project, one of the most coveted outcomes was the ability to empower cross-functional partners to utilize on-brand self-service elements. This led to a decrease in monthly creative requests, freeing up my team to focus on high-value requests and design experiment time to evolve the RingCentral brand.
Role
Under the leadership of the Senior Director of Creative, I worked to build out systems, processes, and guides to ensure the proper use and application of our brand elements. I Served as a creative director and occasional player/coach through the development of these projects.
Team
In-house design and motion team, copywriters, in-house engineers, CMO, Cinco Design, Stout Design, creative project manager, marketing and product marketing leads.
Tools
Adobe Creative Suite, Figma, Google Drive, Wrike