Visual identity, a scalable pattern library, and a suite of animated brand campaigns — plus one mascot who really stuck around.
Overview
SpareFoot was a leading online marketplace for self-storage, which on the surface does not seem like it would lead to great visuals. As Creative Lead, I directed the refinement of SpareFoot's visual identity, consolidating a fragmented set of design patterns into a cohesive, scalable system across SpareFoot.com and every brand touchpoint.
Beyond the pattern library, the work extended into brand storytelling: I conceived, storyboarded, and directed a suite of animated brand awareness campaigns for social media — and in the process, helped cement an internal mascot that took on a life of its own.
Pattern Library
Working closely with the design team and our engineering partners, we developed an entire pattern library in around a month. The team focused on repeatable, solid patterns that worked at all breakpoints as SpareFoot had no mobile app. The business' bread and butter was search results and SEO. The airy, high contrast design allowed for scalability as research taught us just how many questions a customer might need answered to select the storage solution that fits their specific need.
With our patterns up and running, design could produce a page that could be developed and deployed within a day.
Moving is famously extremely stressful. Often we heard from customers that finding and using storage facilities was just another part of that. We set out to help alleviate some of those issues through a redesign of the transactional email program. I chose to focus again on high contrast, high relevance emails that were easy to scan and would send at those key moments during a customer's self-storage process.
Welcome email, emphasizing ease and peace of mind
Move-in day email with helpful info
Brand Campaigns
Self-storage at its core is a solution to a problem. The problem is usually that you have some stuff that needs to be kept safe because of any number of reasons in your life. Those reasons and the things you need to store are so varied that it occurred to me late one night that the stuff needed to be abstracted and to speak for itself.
I storyboarded the idea in a couple of hours and showed it to the head of marketing the next morning. I was given some budget to bring it to life, hiring an animator and recording the dialogue in-house. The campaign did well online, and really took off internally — "Stuff", the yellow puffball, started popping up all over the office as a mascot and a fun shorthand to talk about what we did — helped people find their stuff a home.
Next Project
Making the homepage earn its keep →