Upskilling an in-house design team to lead The rebrand of a modern eLearning organization
Sector: eLearning, edtech, Higher Education
Challenge: Penn Foster Education was founded as the International Correspondence School in 1890. In 2019 a new brand strategy was established, and the organization acquired its closest competitor and its eight sub-brands. Our in-house team was experienced with creative production work but was now tasked with setting the brand direction for the organization. While I had worked on brand strategy as a freelancer, our in-house design team had no experience. Using the CORE Strategy framework from the Futur as a guide, I taught my team how to gather insights, design stylescapes & work with clients in a consultative way.
My Role: creative direction, brand strategy & design, workshop facilitation, UI design
Collaborators: Sarah Kinney - Art Direction, Michael Brennan & Kerri Odell - Visual & Brand Design, Jim Healey - Project Management
RESEARCH & WORKSHOPSBrand strategy
Defining Brand Attributes
This project started with an agency-led blue ocean strategy session with our executives that was organized to identify our positioning and differentiators. Internally, we led multiple brainstorming sessions with our brand team to establish our voice and tone guidelines. We identified our brand attributes and built out our positioning documentation using these resources.
I noted keywords and brand attributes from our workshops and positioning documentation and worked with our CMO and Brand Director to bucket them into these categories.
Culture: Defining the brand.
Customer: Defining the user.
Voice: The brand’s tone when communicating with the user.
Feeling: How a user feels after having interacted with the brand.
Impact: The effect the brand or service has on the users’ lives.
X-Factor: What makes the brand unique
Brand Attribute keywords.
Final Brand Attributes
Culture: Credible, practical, supportive, approachable, proven, opening doors
Voice: Trusted friend, mentor, advocate, practical, empathetic, supportive
Customer: 60% female, needs flexibility with study time & payments, needs a better paying job, single parent or working mother, cost is a major factor.
Feeling: Motivated, welcome, empowered, assured, supported, valued
X-Factor: Scale, thousands enrolled, millions graduated, accredited by regulators and recognized by employers, middle-skill focus on in-demand jobs, social impact - economic opportunity.
Impact: Job-ready, satisfied, confident, proud, better pay, better job
Target Personas
We used student survey data and a storymapping workshops with student-facing employees to build vertical personas.
Trello Board of our defined personas.
Comparative Brand Analysis
We researched competitive and comparative brands in the higher ed, edtech and eLearning industries.
stylescapesVisual design direction
After the research phase, the team gathered their “ingredients” - the brand attributes, persona information, color palette, and design inspiration to craft three unique design directions. These were presented to the executive team in stylescape format for feedback and refinement.
Design Inspiration
Each designer was given a set of brand attributes to work with and built an inspiration board to establish the visual direction of their stylescape.
Color Palette
Penn Foster’s new brand color palette was defined in parallel to our brand work through the UX/UI work being done on the Sitecore redesign. Colors were identified through users testing, color psychology, and competitor research with ADA accessibility requirements in mind.
Stylescapes
Concept A: Career Confidence
Concept B: Steps to Success
Concepts C: Going Places
Concept D: Building Blocks
User Testing
To validate our designs and help with the decision we ran user preference testing through Usability Hub. We tested with users whose demographic data aligned with our personas.
150 users
Location: United States
Gender: Male & Female
Age: 18 – 40
Education Level: some high school – college graduate
Employment Status: Student, unemployed, part-time, full-time
Household Income: 40K and under
Preference test results.
The executive team was impressed with the work and narrowed their choices to Concept A: Career Confidence and Concept D: Building Blocks. These concepts were chosen for their unique brandmarks and visual design, which would work with both B2C & B2B audiences.
We were given direction to refine the two stylescape concepts to help make the final decision.
Revision Goals:
Incorporate more of the bold brand colors
Demonstrate logo options in both all caps and all title case
Visualize the brand for both b2b and b2c audiences
Revised Stylescapes
After revisions and another presentation, the Career Confidence Concept was chosen, and the team began the work to build out the logo system, audit the assets to be rebranded, and establish a budget and timeline for the rebranding production efforts.
Logo DetailsPenn Foster Horizontal Lockup
Penn Foster High School Horizontal Lockup
Brand Mark Rationale
Penn Foster Stacked Lockup
Penn Foster High School Stacked Lockup
conclusionOutcomes & Learnings
This rebrand was one of the most challenging and exciting projects I led as Creative Director of Penn Foster. I learned about Blue Ocean strategy, participated in my first story mapping exercise, and successfully guided my design team through the brand strategy process. This was a huge win for the team, boosting their confidence and transforming the perception of our group from a production-focused creative services team to an in-house agency.