As contract brand design consultant on the Dell Global Brand Creative team, I am responsible for reviewing creative that has been submitted to our team for brand review and supporting our internal clients in their brand and interactive needs. This includes everything from print collateral to interactive, video and event design. I also consult on all Dell internal sites and make sure that the proposed designs are consistent with both Dell.com standards as well as Dell global brand standards. This often includes making recommendations for improving the brand and/or user experience.
Dell Executives
Over the last few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to photograph some of the top Dell marketing executives for an upcoming marketing career guide. It’s been very inspiring to get to spend time with people who have been immensely successful in their careers. I’m grateful for the opportunity to spend a few genuine moments with them.
Dell.com
While a Sr. Designer on the Global Site Design team, I was instrumental in the re-design of Dell.com, which was awarded a Webby in 2011. My work specifically focused on the purchase path and system building processes. Part of this process included UAT testing, which I played a significant role in working directly with our agency partners to produce prototypes for testing in Germany, Brazil, Japan and China.
Aside from the customer facing Dell.com, I worked to transform the internal Dell.com sites into a cohesive, easier-to-navigate system.
Telluride Film Festival Ad
As a sponsor of the Telluride Film Festival, Dell needed to create an ad to showcase both the sponsorship and our commitment and connection to the film industry. This ad was created for the annual yearbook.
Creativity at Dell
For the creativity initiative, we needed a visual strategy that we could use to tie together all the different elements and implementations we would have. Whatever this would be, it needed to be both strategically sound and on brand. We started exploring different elements that could tie the analytical, business side of Dell with the creative, risk taking side. To do this we started looking at different visual elements. Here’s what we landed on and the process I went through:
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The dot grid stood out to me, so I started moving forward. But a blank dot grid doesn’t really say much. It says structure, and maybe analytics. But not much else.
And connecting adjacent dots didn’t do much either.
What could we layer on top that would not just be something pretty, but actually have some significance to the concept? Is there a pattern we could create? Colors? Numbers? Maybe the alphabet?
The alphabet. Now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s start building words. Und…
Unders…
Understanding Creativity. What a mess. There’s some significant meaning here, but it’s just not visually readable.
And getting rid of the lines in place of solid color doesn’t help much.
What happens when we add our brand color palette?
Ah. Building words on top of the analytical structure and applying our brand color system = a creative and unique end result. Business has merged with creativity!
