Developing a flexible brand system for Europe’s biggest provider of open online courses
Role
Lead Product Designer
Skills
Branding
Animation
Visual design
Design systems
Context and my role
FutureLearn is an online learning platform that grew from a small startup offering a handful of free courses into one of the world’s leading online education providers. As Lead Product Designer, I led design across several strategic areas: learner growth, brand development, design system expansion, and the creation of premium paid-for products.
The challenge
FutureLearn entered the market in 2014 with an exciting brand and a mission to bring quality courses to a global audience. Within three years it had expanded rapidly and outgrown its original visual identity which could no longer meet the organisation’s increasingly diverse communication needs. My brief was to evolve the identity into a flexible system that could scale with the business while amplifying FutureLearn’s core principle: that learning should be joyful.
Process
As Lead Designer and brand ambassador, I built on the existing identity to create an extensive system and brand-guidelines documentation, covering an expanded colour palette, typography usage, co-branding rules, social media assets, an image and illustration language, and product branding.
Brand guidelines documentation I created to support the effective application of the brand across all platforms and communications.
Developing the logo into a flexible graphical device
FutureLearn’s existing logo was based around the idea of ‘learning steps’ which represented learners’ progression and growth. It was a simple, strong and recognisable brand mark, but other than the logo it didn’t manifest in any other way within brand communications. I developed the steps into a brand system which could be used flexibly to crop images and solid blocks of colour to reveal the steps in many different ways. From this I built a toolkit of marketing assets which enabled non-design staff to create on-brand course promotions easily.
Course promotional assets which used an image cropping device to reveal the FutureLearn steps logo.
The device was designed specifically to be used in many different ways to allow for more variation across brand communications.
Putting the brand into everyone’s hands
As the organisation grew, staff had begun to create their own presentation templates and social media assets, leading to inconsistencies in brand communication. To address this issue I spent time working directly with the executive team, product leaders and marketing, to better understand the diversity of their needs. This led to me building a brand toolkit which included a flexible presentation template, social media assets, and a library of animated video graphics. I then ran training sessions with over one hundred members of staff and provided support during the transition period, which helped to secure buy-in and improved consistency across brand communications.
FutureLearn presentation toolkit.
A motion language to distinguish products
FutureLearn’s core principle is that learning should be joyful, so I explored the use of animation to express it. One example – the loading screen for FutureLearn’s course-building software nods to its drag-and-drop interface before resolving into a wink and a smile.
As the platform introduced new qualification types – from free online courses to full degrees – I created brand distinction between these products through coloured gradients, three-dimensional space and motion. These experiments grew into a full toolkit of animated video assets that educators used to enrich course content.
Loading screen for FutureLearn’s course creation software. The animation nods to the drag-and-drop interface while communicating the fun and joyful principle of the brand.
FutureLearn provided three levels of course – free entry-level courses, programs and full degrees. To differentiate these I used a combination of colour gradients and three dimensional space.
Celebrating success
One of FutureLearn’s most important revenue streams was its printed certificates of course completion. As part of the brand development I redesigned these into a more premium, desirable product. The design approach employed a modular system where certificates could be tiled together to create an ever expanding representation of a learner’s achievements.
FutureLearn’s premium certificates of course completion.
Many learners would buy a certificate for every course they completed. With this in mind I redesigned them to be modular so they could be tiled to create a visual representation of a learner’s education journey.
On product
On completion of the brand development project I moved on to lead design on the team responsible for the design system. This ensured my work on the development of the brand was successfully translated onto our product and platforms.
FutureLearn design system documentation.
Impact
The work gave FutureLearn a consistent, scalable identity across product, marketing and internal communications, and equipped staff to produce on-brand work independently, and turned certification into a stronger commercial product.
- 100+ staff members trained and onboarded onto the new brand toolkit, improving communication consistency.
- Increase in revenue from paid certificates following the redesign.
- Support requests to the design team to create bespoke assets and presentations were reduced to almost zero.
