Square Developer Brand Reresh 2022
Role: design lead, designer, creative strategist, researcher
Team: Isabelle Sierra Gomez Leon (Creative Director), Lauren Schonzeit (ACD), Kate Catinella (Copywriter), Erika Liberato (Designer)
Output: Brand Guidelines
When I joined the team, Square Developer’s brand was a franskenstein construct of myriad styles of design, tone of voice, interactivity, and goals. Over the course of 9 months, our small working group conducted audience and design research, competitor audits, 5 back-to-back design sprints, and led many cross-team meetings, to develop Square Developer’s first brand system.
Based on our research, we defined our audience as existing on a spectrum between being “deciders,” who are more focused on the front-end, business side of development; and “implentors,” or the hands-on developers. Both audience types exist at businesses of every size. So the brand had to be able to flex to not only these two personas, but also to the needs of indie businesses to enterprise operations, and everything in between.
We established the following to be our brand’s DNA traits, or the foundational qualitities and characteristics thatguided all of our creative decisions:
EMPOWERING
ADAPTABLE
ENGAGED
FUTURE-FACING
SHARP
After several series of design sprints, consults with our collaborators, and interative research, we landed on the following concept and creative framework that we believed would speak to our complex quadrant of audience types.
In December of 2022, we released the first ever Square Developer Brand Guidelines internally and have since re-engaged with the research and design process to develop a new suite of web pages that reflect the Square Developer ecosystem. Stay tuned!