Hernan Valencia - Visual Impact that gets noticed

Google Cloud Innovators: Speaking to developers in their own language
©2022, In-house

Overview

In partnership with developer marketing leads and agencies, we launched the Innovators program to boost developer advocacy. Understanding our audience is particularly difficult to capture, we focused on creating compelling visuals and messaging around exclusive perks, merchandise, and fan engagement.

A small sample of the visual system for the innovators program.

Innovators Hive is the mini event space featured across conventions and Google Cloud's tentpole 3-day event, Next.

A Deeper Look

Challenge

Building the Innovators identity from the ground up was both exciting and challenging. but the biggest hurdle was devising a distinct identity in an already dense ecosystem. You see, Google Cloud has tons of sub-brands and were–at the time–undergoing a simplification process. That meant threading the needle to make sure this program didn't get lost in the crowd. Plus, we were in a bit of a rush—marketing needed to start promoting the program before we even had all the messaging nailed down. And let's not forget the long-term goal: connecting with a notoriously hard-to-reach audience.

Solution

To address these challenges, we conceived the idea of using square brackets < > as a foundational visual pattern. This effective shorthand, familiar to developers, provided a simple yet unique way to visually represent the concept of people converging and collaborating. This simple, unique approach gave us a way to represent the developer community without some stuffy old brand mark. The brackets became the foundation for everything—the overall look and feel, even the skill badges! This initial exploration was a total win, leading us to create program standards, templates, foundational assets, and design principles. Basically, we built a flexible system that let us develop the identity and the messaging at the same time, with plenty of room to experiment and play around.

Results

This initial effort proved highly successful. We were able to effectively enable marketing to promote the program's visual identity at internal and external events, even in the absence of a fully developed messaging platform. The developed program standards, templates, foundational assets, and design principles provided a strong foundation for future development. Because our system was so flexible, we were able to refine both the identity and the messaging as we went. Even better? Leadership was able to take what we built and fine-tune the tone to finally connect with that tricky target audience, validating the effectiveness of the initial design strategy.

Executive Creative Director

Enshalla Anderson

Collaborators
Strategy Lead / Blaire Bender
Project Manager / Denny Tran
Marketing Leads / Natalie McHugh & Cameron Percy
Agency EA/ Melissa Palishen, Rachel Janega, Megan Jaffarian, Ryan Denning & Breanna Sanford