Meghan Creative
EasyBib.png

Branded Design System: Chegg Writing Tools

Chegg needed an overall style guide to better integrate their acquired writing products under the parent company brand system.

Chegg’s acquired “Writing Tools” suite (BibMe, Citation Machine, EasyBib, and Cite This For Me) along with their loyal subscribers not familiar with the Chegg brand, and visa versa. Overall marketing initiative to better integrate all “child” products into a family under the parent company.

Chegg_logo.png

Client: Chegg
Type: Branding, Visual Design
Users: WT Subscribers, Chegg Subscribers

Team: Myself + 4 Visual Designers + 2 Copywriters + 1 CD
Stakeholders: Product Marketing Manager, Content Marketing Manager, Design Manager

Project Focus

  1. Stakeholder POV: Digital marketing deliverables (ads/blog visuals/marketing emails) coincide with product release timetable.

  2. Business goals: Upsell free subs to premium service. Secondary goal: to increase Chegg subs overall on WT products.

  3. Brand Value: Leverage marketing visuals to reinforce the brand’s ease of use and value.

Deliverables

  • 27 Banner Ads: Internal, Display & retargeting

  • 56 Emails: Newsletters, Upsell, Win-back & Cross-sell

  • 54 Branded Blog Visuals: Easybib, Bibme, Cite This For Me, & Citation Machine

Creative Process

  1. Catalogued available visuals assets, hexacodes and product snapshots to develop a “design library” as my starting point.  

  2. Collected available style-guides from product designers, sourced existing assets from folder archives, and extensively researched stock photography sites for visual imagery and iconography.

  3. Utilized Adobe’s “Kuler Color” to research color combinations from hexacodes of each product, and curated custom palettes to compliment Chegg’s rebranded colors.

  4. Brainstormed and ideated on visual topics, reviewed internally with the CM team before presenting externally with stakeholders.

 

Next Steps

  • Open channels of communication with product designers and include their perspective in kickoff meetings

  • Include CM designers (like myself) into post mortem meetings to evaluate successfulness of individual contribution

  • Perform comparative analysis on competitor’s email templates: Mobile first strategy, Visibility, Placement, Color

Assessment

  1. Listening tour with creative marketing during team meeting to evaluate alignment to parent brand (voice and tone)

  2. Present design options externally to stakeholders and iterated based on feedback

  3. Findings included adjusting messaging, visuals, and sometimes information hierarchy (email)

What I learned / gained

Evaluating needs and expectations of PM’s

  • Interdepartmental Collaboration

  • Working with ambiguity

  • Developing style guide & library