Client
Digital Solutions,
World Economic Forum
Date
March 2020
Role
Lead Creative
Skills
Visual Design, Motion, Branding,
Presentation, Print, Illustration,
Email HTML/CSS
Convincing a global organization to shift to a new digital workplace
At the World Economic Forum, we have multiple tools with aspects of intranet-type functionality but knowledge, collaboration, and communication are spread across different platforms.
I led the creative direction of a new intranet solution, working with 2 of our junior designers to bring our visual style to life across digital and print. Working off the Humaaans library, I customized an illustration library for our specific needs. I also contributed to the user research alongside the project team to help verify our assumptions and redirect our product features to be more user-centric. Lastly, I took on an email developer role for our email marketing launch campaign.
The World Economic Forum needed a simple solution to break down team and location silos, engage people, and provide a central knowledge base to digitally connect our 5 global locations. The answer was an enterprise-level intranet, a digital workplace we called WeLink
Strategy
Colleagues were navigating multiple areas and platforms to find information throughout their workday, oftentimes not finding what they needed. The platform at the time was used extensively for many of the event management needs but was not initially purpose-built to function as the company’s intranet.
We worked across global offices to take stock of what the employee needs were, what gaps they’ve identified in their daily processes, and how we could bridge some of those communication barriers.
Our 40+ hours of user and stakeholder interviews, research into our digital tools and culture, strenuous content, and data transfer, resulted in an easy-to-use intranet, or better, digital workplace.
To help ease change management, we created an information booklet for employees to pass around their respective teams. We handpicked “internal champions” to evangelize the project in their employee circles and help their teams transfer knowledge, processes, and fine-tune workstreams with WeLink in mind. We still meet with these champions monthly as another way to ensure bugs and gaps are addressed on the intranet quickly and we’re still serving our main users.
This new intranet supported the Forum’s platform approach by helping us work as a truly networked global organization. A microcosm of the Forum itself: it is a space for people to reach across disciplines and pool resources for greater impact and more innovation.
Identity system
In developing the identity we wanted the brand personality and our execution to meaningfully embody the intranet values we would uphold - transparent communication, collaboration, and celebration of what makes us unique all while nodding to our World Economic Forum brand.
We opted for saturated colors, playful illustrations, and bold type to define our visual system comprising of a brand identity, email design, custom illustrations, instructional videos, branded documents, and custom product features for content co-creation.
Illustrations
With a small team and a large task, we leveraged the Humaaans characters to add visual interest and excitement around the launch campaign.
We created over 30 unique scenes communicating various scenarios across our new intranet, emails, and instructional videos.
