By Allison Connell, Creative Director, Athletics. Allison Connell’s work spans interactive, brand, and print. A Minnesotan, Allison studied graphic design at Iowa State before flying to New York with a single suitcase and an aspiration to work in a small studio tackling big challenges. Joining Athletics in 2011, Allison has helped deepen our approach to design for digital contexts across a series of complex projects for clients ranging from Pulitzer Arts Foundation to Music Together. With a particular focus on elegant digital experiences, Allison uses the tools, technologies, behaviors, and cultures of the web to inform and complement her design practice. When she’s not in the studio, Allison balances her digital work with the hand-marbled paper goods business she launched in 2015.
When Brand and Product Design Become One
For many brands today, websites, digital experiences, and digital products are the primary way that people interact with them. Successful brands today are shrinking the divide between the expressiveness of the brand and the functionality and usability of the digital product, creating a cohesive system of elements, motion, and behaviors across touchpoints.
To go a step further, there’s an even deeper opportunity to leverage the product experience as part of the brand identity, using it as a core storytelling element and an extension of the palette of imagery and illustration. The goal is to shift from simply showcasing the product to using it as raw material for elements within the brand to better express the benefits or the product itself.
Integrating brand and product can help serve two audiences at once: those that are already familiar with the product can recognize it in the brand and connect more deeply with the messaging and storytelling. For those new to the product, it can give the audience a much clearer sense of the value or what to expect before diving in, and there’s some familiarity when learning the product itself. Both of these can only serve to strengthen the relationship between the brand and the product.
Athletics’ identity work for Google Chrome was rooted in the existing digital product: Chrome was no longer just a place for browsing, but a more personalized experience for targeted discovery and real-world action-taking, and the identity needed to showcase that. Our new identity has four modes that reflect how people use their Chrome: Find, Curate, Connect, and Act. These are then expressed using elements familiar to the digital product — buttons, link previews, icons to represent aspects of Chrome like the shopping tab, your calendar, the search bar. Those elements were simplified and slightly abstracted to live in a brand expression — along with imagery and language to build individualized stories that can communicate brand and product messages. By shifting familiar UI into the visual language of the brand, you can build recognition with users who are already familiar, and start to teach new users how to better interact with the digital product itself.
Our work for Link was solving a different challenge: building familiarity with a new brand and experience. Link was a new consumer-facing one-click checkout experience from Stripe, but most people would be encountering the brand in such a small format: a button in other e-commerce checkout flows. This brand identity needed to start with the payment surface in mind, with the logo working well at small-scale, and considering that moment’s micro-interactions. Outside of a payment experience, it needed to make a case for why someone might choose and trust Link over other more familiar payment methods. The logo, contained within a UI-like pill shape, directly references the digital product. In brand expressions, the logo’s contents change to hint at payment information and the transaction, helping to explain what Link is — alongside more traditional brand elements like photography and language.
Figma’s own brand identity is a fantastic example of this approach; they’ve fully integrated language of the product into the brand identity. Expressive elements of the brand demonstrate what you’ll do with the product: build, assemble, design — as well as reflect key details about how it works, from object bounds to multiplayer cursors and more. What makes this most successful is that how each of these product elements is portrayed is abstracted and expressive — it’s reminiscent enough of the experience, but twisted to a more unique, colorful, and delightful version that helps the brand resonate with the product.
Ultimately, brand designers today must become more familiar with the product they’re designing for, how people use it, and what benefits it can bring. The opportunity is to understand the product deeply enough to extract the core essence or benefit, and turn that into brand work that’s expressive, beautiful, and unmistakably connected to the experience it represents. When done well, the experience of the brand and the experience of the product are deeply linked.
