Hi, I’m Casey, Head of Product & Design at FreshBooks.
Rand mentioned to our CEO Mike that he thought we were doing a really great job lately with how we presented our brand online in a consistent way, and asked us to share what we’ve learned in getting here.
First, let me assure you, it wasn’t always this way. I joined FreshBooks in February 2010, and while the company was enjoying great word-of-mouth success, how we presented ourselves across our website, blog, and user interface was disjointed and inconsistent.
Let me start by giving you an idea of some of the problems that a disjointed and inconsistent brand created for us:
- Our Conversion rate had plateaued. It was great, but we wanted to go higher, and our inconsistency had put a glass ceiling on our results.
- When users navigated between our online properties, the experience was disorienting and interrupted their flow – another bad thing for conversions.
- Reviewing any design with our CEO became a constant debate about how to best execute for our brand, rather than executing for a specific page or project.
- Multiple Designers had come and gone, each with their own strong opinions on our brand. They left their individual marks and you could clearly tell who had designed what things.
- As we hired more designers (we went from one designer to a team of six in just under 18 months) further divergence of our brand was bound to happen.
So here’s what we learned…
1. Hire a Brand Consistency Professional
We had Designers on-staff already, but their primary expertise was in visual design and interaction design, rather than pure branding. Once we recognized we needed someone looking at the big picture of our brand, as opposed to our software, we hired an Art Director. No software company I’d ever worked for or heard of had an Art Director on staff. This was a big risk, and we were a little wary of the idea. Why should we trust the brand of our software company to someone who’s never worked at a software company before?
However, an Art Director is a very common position at an Advertising Agency, where they establish consistent visual guidelines for brands all the time. This sounded a lot like what we needed. So we hired Jeremy on a contract, and it was one of the best things we ever did for Design at FreshBooks. We hired him full-time after three months, and two years later he’s now the leader of our Design team.
When hiring new team members, we give everyone who makes it through our first round of interviewing a copy of our Brand Book, and have them do a design exercise where they try to maintain brand consistency while executing a communications project. If you can’t do that, we don’t hire you – that helps keep people who are too stubborn to adapt to our brand’s style out of the ranks.
2. If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It
We started by completely re-thinking our brand using new type-faces, colors, and textures (see images of this below). We tried to totally redefine the brand visually, but after a few failed attempts, we decided that what we really needed to do was identify the core elements that were working with our brand, and use them as building blocks.
Our logo and company colors were great – so we kept those. We also kept our primary font, and our informal photography style. What we ended up doing was codifying how these things should be used in conjunction with one another, along with developing a few new elements which filled the gaps; including a new signature illustration style, and our “no gradients” rule.
Example of re-inventing where we didn’t need to:
We tried some seriously silly stuff in hindsight (see “customer trapped in kryptonite” images below) that was part of the rabbit hole we initially went down. We’re all really glad we made a u-turn. Our approach to photography ended up just being extra casual, natural light, and no Photoshop treatment whatsoever.
What we tried… and didn’t like…
Where we ended up with our photography…
3. Patience is Key — Take Your Time
Consistent branding is an ultra-marathon, not a sprint. It took us well over a year to get our act together, and 18 months later we fight a daily battle to keep our brand consistent across all of our outward-facing properties and assets.
Don’t feel like you need to tackle this all with one mega project. Instead, break it down into smaller pieces and move a few boulders at a time. We created a roadmap that spanned over the course of a year with what we’d tackle first (we started with our main website, and moved to our blog next), and with what can wait until later.
We looked at our customer acquisition funnel, and focused on the areas at the top of the funnel where consistency starts. Our homepage, tour, and landing pages were all created in one project, and further down the funnel, we are still working to make things like our FAQ pages, individual blog posts, and web application consistent.
Lastly, understand that your brand is never “finished”, and just when you think you’ve got everything consistent something will change (internally or externally) and you’ll need to evolve everything again. All companies face this challenge, but starting again at a consistent place will make your evolution easier.
4. Plan Your Attack
We ran this branding consistency effort like a real project. It had a schedule, a plan, and specific people from many departments contributing. To kick things off, assemble the team, setup your plan, and communicate it broadly.
This sounds simple, but the act of putting your plan to paper and communicating it broadly within your organization is an opportunity for everyone in the company to be made aware of the importance of doing this, as well as give them a chance to contribute to the project. SEO, for example, should be part of the plan from the very beginning, and the person responsible for it should be working closely with the Designer(s).
We also implemented a daily stand-up meeting at 10am where everyone talks about what they are working on, and shares the previous day’s efforts with one another. We critique each other’s work every day, and have found it to be a great opportunity to catch brand inconsistencies before they go out into the wild.
We hold each other accountable for consistency, every day.
5. Designate a Design Dictator
Until you’ve got your brand 100% defined and documented, many of the decisions you need to make will be opinion based. Problem with that is that opinions are like pet beavers, everyone in Canada’s got one. So if our tough decisions were going to be consistent, they needed to come from one person.
In our case, that was our co-founder Mike. He founded the company in his parent’s basement almost 10 years ago, so nobody understands what makes FreshBooks, FreshBooks, more than he does. Find the person in your company who will make the crucial opinion-based decisions, and have other people on your team rally around that person. This allows your team to agree quickly, move forward, and not waver on those decisions so you can stay consistent. Maybe that person is you, maybe not.
That said, not everybody is cut out to be a Design Dictator, but that’s a post for another day…
Here’s a picture of our CEO Mike – arbiter of taste, approver of everything.
6. Build Your Brand Book
Once we started down this path, we learned fairly quickly what worked and what didn’t, and always attempted to figure out why it worked (or didn’t). Then we wrote it down on our internal Wiki as a Lesson Learned. Each written lesson contains what we were trying to accomplish, exactly what we did, and what the results were. These lessons allow us to put systems in place that others can follow.
Sometimes we split-tested things, sometimes it was more about getting feedback from our Design Dictator about what he liked or didn’t like. Having written these things down, we were able to share these lessons more broadly within the company so more people didn’t make the same mistakes, and could build on the great work of others.
Example of a lesson learned, and subsequently written-down on our Wiki:
Another way we documented things was by creating a Brand Book and a set of written User Interface Guidelines.
The brand book contained really specific details about our logo usage, fonts, color palette, the type of photography we’d accept (for example, we didn’t allow ourselves to ever use stock photography or illustration ever again, anywhere), as well as little things like how a shadow should look, or how much space to leave around a headline on a landing page.
This was yet another way we could scale our approach to branding not just internally, but also externally with any Designers or Production companies we used to supplement our own in-house design team.
Example from our Brand Book: Something as simple as having a consistent color for your Headlines & Calls to Action can help drive brand consistency.
7. Stand on the Shoulders of Giants
Not everything will fall within your core area of expertise. Defer to other experts if necessary. Once you’ve got the visual parts of your brand worked out, understand that you’ve only completed one part of branding. There’s still a lot more to work on that also needs to be standardized across your whole company, such as your approach to copywriting, conversion optimization, and usability fundamentals.
You could go so far as to build your own custom guides for these things as well, but we didn’t. We had found some great books and we had everyone on the team read each of them as a Book Club. We assembled the team twice a week to review a few chapters at a time and discuss what we found important, to read interesting passages, and to debate the topics.
Some of the books we found incredibly important to us were: Persuasive Online Copywriting & Call to Action (By the Eisenberg brothers), and Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. Reading these books together as a book club was a great way to get everyone on the same page about these other critical elements of our brand, without feeling like we needed to re-invent the wheel and come up with our own copywriting guidelines for example. As we mature and scale the company, we know we’ll need to formalize these things to a greater degree, but we’re not there just yet.
Sometimes just having everyone agree you’re going to follow a particular playbook (despite it being written by someone else) is enough to get you started.
The road to FreshBooks brand consistency has at times been treacherous, but by identifying our key problems, borrowing insights from others and continually tweaking our methods, we developed our winning formula. Hopefully how we did it will help you create yours too.
