Kudos

Project Deliverables: eBooks, print brochures, digital ads, branding, and production management

My Role: Graphic design, UI design and brand management

Kudos is an online employee engagement SaaS platform that embraces the power of social software to help organizations share meaningful value-based recognition, creating an irresistible workplace culture. Engagement programs powered by Kudos see higher employee retention, improved employee happiness, and a boost in overall company performance.

Kudos had been outsourcing much of its design work over the years, which had resuled in a wide range of different design styles that weren't cohesive. This meant that the company wasn't able to present a unified branding vision. My goal as Brand Manager at Kudos was to identify all marketing materials in use, standardize the design style, and build a comprehensive file sharing system for all departments within the company.

Kudos’ design style had evolved over the years, which led to a variety of different designs across the Kudos brochures (which are divided into groups including Culture Guides, Case Studies, and Admin Guides). Here are some examples of the different brochure cover designs that were in use:

As the company had recently undergone a rebranding, our design team decided to use the graphic elements that were currently in use, but clean them up and standardize the designs as much as possible. We then applied this design to all existing graphics, from brochures to display ads. We called this our 'transitional' design style and served to bring all existing branding materials into the same design style.

Once we had achieved design consistency with our 'transitional' look, we were able to introduce a more comprehensive rebranding. The new designs included new fonts, design elements, and colors.

Here are four examples, showing the original document on left, the transitional design in the center, and the final redesign on the right:

You can see more Culture Guides (including the full downloadable PDFs) on the Kudos website.

You can see more Case Studies (including the full downloadable PDFs) on the Kudos website.

Kudos’ social media posts reflected the wide range of different design styles that had been implemented over the years:

We then applied the same transitional design, typography, and colors to our online ads:

Kudos regularly hosts webinars about the importance of Employee Recognition, and I would design the PowerPoint slides. You can view the PowerPoint presentations in the videos below, or see more on the Kudos website:

The Kudos platform has a variety of badges to represent awards, milestones and achievements for users. The badge designs hadn't been updated in years and were in desperate need of a refresh. The old badges were inconsistent, and full of tiny details that weren't visible when posted on the platform. 

I simplified the badges using our Kudos color palette in a more modern style. The old badges are shown below on the left, with the redesigned badges are on the right:

We also needed an efficient and easy-to-navigate system for internally sharing all of our marketing materials. So, I built a comprehensive site on Sharepoint that we used to organize and share our brand assets, brochures, videos, webinars and so on. This helped other teams such as Sales, Product, CSMs and Onboarding to quickly find the information they need: