Danielle Vernelson
Social Graphics
Case Study Design Week for Highspot Social Graphics
Goal of the project: Improve the appearance in order to increase the click-through-rate
Created while working at: Highspot
Role: Graphic Designer
Project Details Improving the Look of Highspot Social Graphics
Introduction
Highspot as a brand was fairly new when I was hired in 2020. The look and feel had just been updated, and was fairly flat. The click-through-rate wasn’t stellar, and since the the brand standards were in the early stages of its evolution, we as designers wanted to get more creative with our graphics, and needed some new patterns to be approved by our art director in order to do so.
Design Week 2021
For our Visual Design team, design week was like our Super Bowl. It was a chance to play with new ideas and not feel bound by any constraints. For this particular design week, we focused on up-leveling social graphics, because they needed the most help.
What follows are Before/Afters for how I improved the look of our social graphics.
Inspiration
Social Graphics with General Messaging
Before:
Our design style was very blocky. Photography felt very “stock” and not very lively or exciting.
After:
I proposed more interesting photography and overlapping text treatments, as well as the use of diagonals for more dynamism.
Social Graphics That Advertised Our Product
Before:
In our old graphics, the imagery was always separated from the text by chunky rectangles, and relied on plain stock photography for the main visual, without telling you anything about what Highspot does.
After:
Cutout people on interesting backgrounds draw the eye. Miniature screens from our product tease Highspot’s capability, and the layering creates depth.
Social Graphics that Advertise Newly-Released Reports
Before:
We used to make generic, flat images that showed very little (if any) of the content you would find in the report.
After:
I played with gradient backgrounds to add more depth and interest, and pulled content from the actual report to tease its content. We found that stats in particular were more likely to be clicked on by viewers.
Social Graphics for New Product Releases
Before:
This city graphic feels generic. We needed more ways to generate excitement visually.
After:
I remixed some fun illustrations from our library, adding imagery of a flying car to imply that idea of the release being futuristic.
Social Graphics with Quotes
Before:
The image of the speaker felt disconnected from the actual quotation, and not all of the photos of speakers were high-quality enough to look good at this size.
After:
By setting the light blue block on a white background, the quotation mark can break the frame in an interesting way.
Instagram Highlight Tiles
Before:
The Instagram tiles weren’t designed by the design team, and had text in the images, with emojis below. This was problematic, because the tiles were hard to read, and screen-readers wouldn’t be able to read them, so they weren’t accessible. Not to mention, they were ugly!
After:
I recommended that we use illustration instead of text in the image area, and worked with my marketing partner to develop high-level categories that each tile should cover.
Results
Our marketing partners were extremely excited by the wider variety of designs that were now available as a result of design week. Our click-through rate for demand-gen ads improved by 15.25% when we looked at the month before design week (June 2021), versus the month after design week (August 2021), which was significant. And, our whole team liked the new patterns so much that we began expanding their use to other places like collateral and web.