Overview
Creative Playground is a leading branding and marketing agency with a proven track record of success in retail, entertainment, sports, and fashion/licensing. They have collaborated with a diverse range of clients, from startups to established industry giants such as Oscar de la Renta, Loreal, Bebe, Brookstone, and Refinery29. As a Visual Designer at Creative Playground for two years, I contributed to the development of the company's brand and marketing materials, including its corporate identity, website, and presentations, in addition to working on client projects.
Brand Identity
When I joined Creative Playground at its inception, the company's visual identity was in need of a cohesive and purposeful direction. At that time, the main brand color was a bold yellow paired with a soft gray, which didn't reflect the agency's desired image. Recognizing the importance of a strong brand presence, particularly as we embarked on the website development project, it became evident that a rebranding effort was necessary. Given the constraint of using the existing logo, I took the lead in developing a new visual identity.
I developed a mood board that served as the basis for the creative direction. I decided on an electric pink shade in combination with a high-contrast black color. Being a female-led company, we wanted to develop visuals that showcased a strong feminine brand.
Site Development
The Project
When we began the development of the website for Creative Playground, our primary goal was to establish a distinct voice and solidify our presence in the digital creative space. As a startup, we needed a way to quickly showcase our founder's decades worth of industry experience.
This project was originally created with the help of Adobe Muse. A design-to-code platform that was unfortunately discontinued. In 2019, I eagerly took on the task of re-coding the entire website from scratch. This decision was due to my desire to ensure the long-term viability and functionality of the website, as well as maintain its compatibility with the evolving web standards and technologies.
design and development
As I delved into the design process for the website, I looked for inspiration across the web, ultimately finding a series of websites that celebrated and showcased female CEOs. Given Creative Playground's commitment to empowering women in traditionally male-dominated industries, this felt like the appropriate direction to go. I embarked on the design journey, beginning with the exploration of different wireframes to experiment with various design choices.
For the design, I chose to maintain a relatively simple aesthetic, I opted to incorporate the light bulb from the logo into a theme throughout. As I refined the actual design, I began to put together a component library to allow myself or future designers to streamline the creation of future brand assets and make any future website changes.
In the process of re-coding the website from scratch, I used Adobe XD to redesign certain aspects and create quick prototypes. This allowed me to re-examine the site's responsiveness and tweak some issues that I had with the original site.
SEO Optimization
Before publishing the website, searching Creative Playground on Google or Bing yielded results of nearby playgrounds for children. Building organic traffic and moving our new website up the ranks on search engines was one of our first priorities when publishing the website. This project was my first time applying the research I've done on SEO optimization to an actual website. Within 3 weeks of publishing the site, it began to show up as the first option after searching the company; followed by the company's social sites (ex: LinkedIn).
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