Karat

Karat

uplevel karat’s brand from startup to Seattle’s next unicorn

OVERVIEW

When I joined Karat, there was a logo, a color palette, and wonderful photography. I was brought on to turn those elements into a legitimate visual identity that would mature the brand from a startup to Seattle’s next biggest unicorn. I functioned as a one-woman design team collaborating with Marketing, Product, Sales, vendors, and Engineers to build the Karat brand today. I also helped build Karat’s sub-brand Brilliant Black Minds. Blog posts, reports, presentation decks, brand extension, swag… If something was designed at Karat in 2020, I had some hand in it. After a year, I was promoted to Brand Strategist and worked more closely with VP of Marketing and Director of Comms to articulate the brand externally and internally.

role

Brand Designer

Brand Strategist

Visual brand guidelines

My ultimate mission at Karat was to define, improve, and maintain the brand. I wrote a 48 page visual identity book that articulated and expanded all the ways the brand should be expressed and function. Some of the brand questions I tackled were: How do the design principles contribute to the company principles? How should the logo work in motion? When we are co-branding something? When should the abbreviated version be used?

I built the guidelines in Figma so elements could be directly exported by future designers, and exported in PDFs for non-designers and vendors.

thought leadership content

Karat is a thought leader in making interviews fair, predictive, and enjoyable. I was in charge of designing reports, ebooks, case studies, infographics, and presentations under a consistent visual identity. Oftentimes, I was balancing several at a time under challenging deadlines.

post

In between larger projects I was at the ready to create blog images, edit presentations, whip up charts and graphs and select the right photo to tell the right story. I helped build the system in Figma that would be replicated by future designers.

videos

I expanded the identity for thumbnails, lower thirds, and title cards for YouTube.

Illustration and storyboarding

Years of illustrating quickly proved useful when we needed to develop an illustration style for our premiere video (at top of page). I developed simple characters that balanced Karat’s commitment to data with “human-centeredness”. Cliff+Co brought the characters to life with friendly and professional animation.