Scaling a trusted brand for broader community and business impact at Stack Overflow

Website

To show what a typical workflow looks like, here is how I designed Stack Overflow's company pages. I worked with our Brand Design team lead on wireframes. We then iterated on design, settled on a final direction, refined the page design, and finally built the page. The following were a collaboration between Brand Design, Product Marketing, People, and Operations. I was responsible for wireframing, design, and illustration.

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When I first joined Stack Overflow, the product marketing pages were three separate brands. Over the course of two years, I collaborated with the Brand Design team to unify product sub brands and align across marketing pages. My responsibilities included:

• Branding - Decide how three lines of business (Teams, Talent, Advertising) can sit in parallel to each other under one umbrella brand (Stack Overflow) and visually implement this strategy.
• Design - Conduct briefing, competitive research, wireframing, concepting, refining, asset management for developers, pre-launch comb and check. Scalable assets were also needed for corresponding marketing campaigns.
• Illustration/imagery - Decide where we use spots, illustrations, product abstractions, and product views; and craft overarching styles.
• Cross-collaboration - A big part of projects like these are collaborating with product marketing managers, the demand gen team, a developer, and product designers. Bringing everyone along and getting buy-in is the hardest, but most important part of the process.

Spot illustrations

During my time at Stack I made ~50 spot illustrations for the shared product and brand design system. I defined the style in collaboration with our Design Systems lead and then made three sizes of spots for various concepts. The spots scaled between three sizes and could be recolored dynamically depending on the context.

Ads

Ads used to be made from scratch for every campaign. Once we scaled to making sets of 90+ ads for Google Display and PPC campaigns, I was set aboutwith standardizing new ad layouts for efficient and consistent production by using components and autolayout in Figma. Ad campaigns are produced in collaboration with the Demand Gen, Content, and Product Marketing teams. I also lead and oversaw the outsourcing of this some of this work to freelance designer.

One+ pagers

Stack Overflow's one pagers are not always one page but they do have a flexible, modular system that I and the Brand Design team created for easy layout and quick turn around. These are done in collaboration with Sales, CS, and Product Marketing.

Infographics

Sometimes there's a more specific, data-driven story to tell as part of a campaign. This is where infographics come in!

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Illustration

Stack Overflow had a variety of illustration needs, I collaborated with our Brand Design Lead to agree on a style to follow that fit the brand and then scaled the style across different needs for empty states, one pagers, ads, website images, decks, etc. Below is a sampling of illustrations I made.

Decks, Sales and internal

Deck needs at Stack range from master templates for Sales and CS, to internal templates, to CEO and board presentations, and one off customer decks.

Wherever possible, I try to make the content into a module that could be reused down the line. 

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