AirMason is an online employee handbook builder for culture-driven companies. The editor makes it incredibly easy to create and distribute responsive digital handbooks. My former boss, Tehsin Bhayani, founded the start-up and brought me on to rebrand and redesign the website. Other than the specific request to keep the blue and orange primary colours form the previous branding, we did a complete visual overhaul.
Scope
— Discovery & Strategy — Logo System — Typography & Colour — Illustration — Web Design — Animation — Digital Marketing Collateral
In today’s workforce, it’s hard to talk about a successful company without mentioning their killer culture. You know: the vision, values, language and beliefs — the foundation, really — that the company is built upon. If your company has a bad culture in the workplace, it’s kind of like a poison that eats away at your employee’s happiness and morale.
The employee handbook is one of the most important documents your company will ever develop. If you're wondering what typically goes into an employee handbook, it contains information about company rules and policies regarding people’s benefits, sick pay, vacation time, and important company information like your values and beliefs. A surprising amount of company employees don’t know what they’re entitled to in their job simply because they aren’t told or there are miscommunications. A standardized handbook gives everyone a reference point and allows them to know exactly where they stand as one of your employees.
Brand Problems
— Unidentified ideal audience & users — Logo had been bought from stock / clipart website and lacked meaning — No branded accent colours, so dozens of accent colours were used throughout brand materials and the old website — Our website didn't reflect our talented design team
Goals
— Appeal to enterprise corporations yet still attract the smaller-medium sized businesses that had been keeping us in business — Develop a consistent colour palette & symbolic logo mark — Reflect AirMason's forerunning focus on original, creative & relevant design
The Logo Mark
We wanted to create a logo mark that was minimal enough to be easily scaleable, versatile, and meaningful to our handbook product. The name AirMason is a bit obscure and doesn't actually have much meaning behind it- it was originally chosen from an online logo name maker - but we were stuck with it because it was heavily tied to SEO. We chose to use the outline of a book to symbolize our product, along with the A + M initials.
The Website
Clean and minimalist, with deliberate touches of fun illustrations and creative patterns to further position the AirMason team as creative industry leaders. The AirMason team helps create beautifully designed handbooks for our customers so it was important that our own website design reflect our talented team and design-focused product.
UI Boards & Colours
I presented two brand boards to our team for the website UI direction. We decided on board number two: it's lighter theme best reflected our open and friendly team + product. Plus, the more muted, desaturated accent colours from the second board were a bit more sophisticated to attract our ideal client: corporate enterprise businesses.
Typography
We chose an assertive serif font called Calluna for the website's main font. The font designer describes that Calluna "combines the charm of classic design with the clean-cut appeal of modernism" and we couldn't agree more.
User personas
Before designing the website we broke down our current users into a few different user persona categories. We determined that our users consisted of small businesses with limited budgets, HR department employees from medium businesses, enterprise companies, and prospective AirMason employees.
Customer interviews
After conducting some interviews with these users, we discovered something huge was missing from our website: examples of the actual end product, in various industries. Not just little snapshots of a handbook or an example of one measly handbook. No no no, our potential customers needed more from us! They needed to see all the beautiful potential ways they could display their handbook information using our platform, and they needed to see it in a full-scale, extremely accessible way.
The results
After designing an in-your-face collection of our best handbook examples that sits right below the hero section on the homepage, we (almost immediately!) saw an increase in user sign-ups and inquiries, and later in profits and growth.
Interactive social ads
Eye-catching, fun and confident to reflect our best-in-class product. Targeted towards HR departments in medium-sized businesses.
