HOBY PHILLIPS ALBRIGHT

How does design establish brand consistency — and allow for growth?

In 2017, Upside was a nascent company with little brand recognition. Similarly, there were no design standards in place. The result: a hodgepodge of visual design treatments with the potential to lead to consumer confusion.

Understanding the criticality of this need, I immediately began to create Upside’s first set of codified brand elements: basic color palette, typefaces, and usage examples.

By putting design parameters around Upside’s visual language, I ensured brand consistency in time for the product’s first go-to-market push.

Once I saw the initial brand guidelines in action, I began to gather feedback: how people used the guidelines, the missing pieces, and what needed improvement.

That feedback drove the second iteration of the brand guidelines (displayed on this page).

Topics include:

• Logo usage with situational recommendations for color

• Expanded clarification on photography direction

• Base color definitions in hexadecimal, RGB, CMYK and extended palette for Material design system

• Typography recommendations for usage and color combinations

• Iconography

• Illustration

In addition, I partnered with Upside’s lead copywriter to bring together art and copy and give cohesion to the guide.

Aside from serving as an ongoing record of the Upside brand, the guidelines allowed my colleagues outside of the Design Team to have the information they needed to create marketing materials with consistency at scale.

Upside Business Travel is a tech startup in Washington, DC led by the co-founders of Priceline.com. Upside is focused on providing innovative top-tier business travel support to small and mid-sized businesses.

How does design lead a consumer?

When I joined Upside, there was a third-party UX effort, widespread design disparity, and a countdown clock ticking down to the launch date.

My early days involved working at breakneck speed, rapid prototyping, building, launching and testing in order to learn as quickly as possible… and then move on to the next thing.

As the sole internal product designer, there was plenty to do.

It was not uncommon to handoff files to a developer in the evening and return the next morning to the work being live on the site.

The screens to the left depict first generation of the Origin & Destination Search page, Flight & Hotel Results pages, and Hotel Filtering. All work was responsive to render on multiple breakpoints.

Upside Business Travel is a tech startup in Washington, DC led by the co-founders of Priceline.com. Upside is focused on providing innovative top-tier business travel support to small and mid-sized businesses.

How does design support a rapid process?

The social marketing needs of Upside were a real-time stress test for the Design System. Photography, illustration, typography, color, button styles, logo usage, and writing style collided on a constrained canvas to convey a message in a second’s glance.

After I assessed the team’s workflow and creative needs, I designed and refined a library of custom elements and templates that could be used to create assets at scale.

In addition to providing a rapid-response design framework for the team, my development of the social library ensured brand consistency across all touchpoints.

As a result, the Upside marketing team was better able to respond to the real-time demands dictated by social media.

Upside Business Travel is a tech startup in Washington, DC led by the co-founders of Priceline.com. Upside is focused on providing innovative top-tier business travel support to small and mid-sized businesses.

How does design help build a team?

In the beginning of a startup, the walls are bare and there’s no swag kit sitting on your desk on the first day. What’s needed is a significant amount of user research and a massive focus on the product.

But, it’s building a culture that ultimately drives success. Design played a critical role in establishing Upside’s corporate culture.

In addition to making people feel part of a team, the culture work was designed to help colleagues see how the brand could manifest in multiple ways.

While balancing the design goals of the product itself with go-to-market campaigns, I collaborated with the People Operations team to propose ways that design could help build Upside’s culture.

I created:

• Posters to communicate business proposition and OKRs

• Original artwork to highlight our mantras

• Laptop stickers reflecting our Delight, Crank, Vibe mantras

• Hackathon promotional materials

• Conference room signage and office wayfinding graphics

• Hats, t-shirts, and mugs for events and swag

These artifacts helped create an environment where employees felt they were part of something larger: a team that understands what success means, delights in the work, and feels a personal connection to the brand.

Upside Business Travel is a tech startup in Washington, DC led by the co-founders of Priceline.com. Upside is focused on providing innovative top-tier business travel support to small and mid-sized businesses.

I provided detailed guidance and specifications for accurate production. Close collaboration with fellow designers and developers was required as this was an ongoing effort to built a state of the art online t-shirt design lab.

I also worked closely with a cross-functional team to inherit previous work and understand intent, while continuing to solve for ongoing UX situations in various states of completion.

Created modular typography scale including responsive adjustments.

While this work was ongoing… I took initiative to give the current Design Lab a much needed visual update while a New Design Lab experience was being produced by a dedicated team.

This effort sought to maintain functional parity, while cleaning up layout, typography, controls, and color palette.

Homepage Megamenu

Transformed navigation to provide users with interactive means to surface desired products with minimal clicks.

Group Order Form

Based on needs identified in extensive user research, this feature relieved the burdens group organizers experience when ordering custom apparel.

This added functionality allowed organizers to share group orders via social media and email,  and distribute the tasks of size selection and payment.

Led design for cross-functional team to create, iterate, test, and launch.

Modernized catalogue presentation to provide users with streamlined product representation and improved ability to filter results.

Provided comps and guidance for responsive layouts.

Created multiple forward-thinking iterations to provide product team with vision to present to stakeholders.

Collaborated with CustomInk internal operations to shift perception of employee-facing feedback tool, renamed "Circuit."

We needed to overcome a reluctance among employees to provide much needed feedback for process improvement and issue awareness.

By combining the acts of giving praise via a "Wow" and providing constructive input via "Feedback" the new tool provided a greater ease of use and increased interaction dramatically.

I worked to gain consensus among leadership and brand team to extend restrictive brand boundaries, allowing “Inky” to express acknowledgment of LGBT Pride Month on social media channels.

I created comps to demonstrate the concept, and met with key decision makers in person to obtain approval, then took responsibility for execution of final assets.

This adaptation of the Inky logo was well received internally and externally, gaining exposure through Likes and Shares on social channels.

This project was by far the most challenging of my career as a designer. At task was the challenge of shifting 3700+ hotel websites across 16 brands to a responsive framework while simultaneously applying a new Digital Design System.

We sought to streamline user interactions, unify behavior patterns, and present appropriate content for devices by shifting presentation and priorities.

Equally as challenging was the notion that the sites needed to continue to meet key performance indicators, metrics and revenue goals.

To add to the complexity, we needed to shift from a 10 column fixed grid to a 12 column fluid grid system as well as apply a set of standards to an existing body of 700,000+ photography assets in varied sizes, and implement a forward facing Akamai dynamic image delivery system.

In mid 2012, as guests' expectations for wireless internet access increased, Marriott’s High Speed Internet Access offering required evolution.

There was a clear user need to streamline the connecting process and unify it across brands while allowing each brand's voice to be expressed. This need was balanced with a distinct business requirement to capture revenue.

As UX Design Lead, I was quick to recognize that guests were accessing property WiFi from multiple devices. This was the first Marriott Digital product line to roll out a responsive design.

As Agile methodologies and practices began to be evangelized within eCommerce, we pushed to prototype and evolve our specifications and documentation, as 17 internet service providers nationwide were required to replicate our login screens.

While we worked and made progress, we shared our learnings with the larger User Experience team.

Utilizing an existing framework of components, I was tasked with leading the design and coordination of integrating the Protea hotel chain into the Marriott family of brands. 

This existing framework became responsive in late 2014. In the meantime, there was a requirement to design within the existing system while being forward thinking so that these layouts will adapt once the new responsive framework took hold.

Marriott's Food & Beverage Services Group sought to reposition hotel restaurants as destinations in and of themselves. By featuring desirable locations, recipes by renowned chefs, and cocktail recipes with video instructions, this mini-site accomplished its goals.

Built to be scalable, additional restaurant properties and recipes could easily be added by content managers.

I served as Design Lead and collaborated closely with developers as well as presenting to stakeholders. In addition I collaborated with a food stylist to direct and shoot cocktail photography.

Our team was faced with producing a brand site for the Autograph Collection of boutique hotels on very short turnaround.

Autograph Collection, as a brand, needed to be expressed very subtly to allow the unique and distinct characteristics of each property's brand to be showcased. The site needed to be scalable to allow future hotel brands to be added by content managers.

Responsible for creative direction and photography selection.

Through close collaboration with the JW Marriott brand team, copywriters, and developers, this mini-site showcased destination properties and expressed the JW brand voice appropriately to engage users and increase awareness of locations internationally.