SketchUp

SketchUp Brand Design

SketchUp is a professional tool and the most popular 3D modeling software in the world. It is used by many of the leading design professionals in architecture, interior design, construction, and furniture design.

We redefined the SketchUp brand, creating a more professional and mature aesthetic, consistent with our existing user-base and new target market.

As the Art Director, I led the small team that was tasked with tight deadlines and large volumes of work. The marketing team’s design needs ranged from a new design system and full redesign the website, to building upon and improving brand standards in both digital and print formats

Project Details

2017–2020

Scope

Brand Standards
Website Design
Iconography
Digital Design

Role

Art Direction & Design

Team

Tyler Barnard, Creative Strategist
Mike Heighway, Art Director
Sean Ortiz, UX Lead
Sam Nielsen, Designer
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Typefaces

Benton Sans by Tobias Frere-Jones

Website

SketchUp gets over 90 million unique views to their website annually. For 2019, we redesigned the website under an exceptionally tight timeline. The user experience was rethought, and it was given visual overhaul. To make the home page more dynamic, we integrated native browser-based animation using Lottie, which allowed us to bring complex animations directly out of After Effects into the browser.

Style Guide

A thorough style guide helps build brand consistency and provides a strong backbone from which designers and other team members can build from, and reference to represent the brand correctly. We redefined the SketchUp brand and integrated it into the parent brand, Trimble. This meant an intentional step away from the well-known SketchUp red brand color that had been used for the previous 15 years, and required embracing Trimble’s brand blue.

Marketing Imagery

A new website required a large library of new imagery that appealed to each of our user personas. I worked directly with The Boundary, one of the world’s leading architectural visualization firms based in the UK, to art direct the project from the beginning. By managing the project from the inception, and working directly with both of The Boundary’s founders, Henry Goss and Peter Guthrie, we were able to achieve a modern design with a high degree of photo realism and integrating SketchUp’s unique look and feel, all while building a digital architecture that was inhabitable in both Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality systems.

Product Imagery

When users open SketchUp, the first imagery they see is the product imagery—something designed using the software. Working with in-house and out-of-house designers, I art directed the team and contributed to the 3D modeling in the creation of the product imagery for 2019 and 2020.