The Graphic Designer position at the software API company PubNub became a multifaceted design position, starting as brand creation and general visual content creation, and eventually absorbing responsibilities like virtual events, landing pages, and more. At PubNub I have lead design meetings with partnering brands for products, launches, and live and virtual events. With PubNub’s marketing team we created several campaigns for launches; including logos, guides, adverts, and social media posts. Also with partnering creatives we animated videos and motion graphics for promotions and sales. All that and presentation decks for all sales kick-offs and quarterly for Chief execs.
Brand Identity and Brand Guide Creation
Every brand guideline is a rule book for those who work directly with the company's visual brand identity assets. The correct color palette, logo usage, and clear space - each of these things should be established at the beginning of a brand identity development process.
Working with PubNub chief executives on their vision, we created solid identity guidelines, as well as an in-depth look into mission, values, and future goals.
Before I started at PubNub there was no real brand guide, or really any guide or assets at all. The main logo was already set, but that’s about it. And it was a darker vermillion. I wanted to create a more contemporary and lively feel, so I changed the “PubNub" red to a brighter hue red/orange, made a secondary and wonderful contrast color of a sea teal, and a governing ratio of 80% white to “keep the page spacious and light”. Previously the vermillion was used everywhere, often giving headers, ads, and pages; giving everything a dusty theater feel. Along with the logo and colors, I made rules for type, copy, borders, and best use for visual assets I created.
Videos - Customer Testimonials, Demos, and Q&A
At PubNub I created many of their new videos. Often working with just screen recordings from sales or dev teams I tried to make the most with what I had. Sometimes I was there for recording, but more often than not I edited and and title slides to what was handed off.
Customer Testimonials - I gathered and filmed interviews from our 2021 summit in San Fransisco. I edited clips in Premiere and created motion graphics in After Effects.
Chat Demo - This is a simple walkthrough for customers on setting up chat for their applications.
Advertisements, Blog Posts, and Social
Below is a sampling of what made up the day to day requests and projects. While a fair share of my job is planning for bigger scope projects such as product releases and conferences, at least a couple hours a day were dedicated to adverts, blogs, and social media posts.
Dozens of these native advertisements were generated quarterly, promoting basic pillars of our products capabilities such as chat in gaming.
Often our advertisements were done in tandem with co-sponsors or other developers that we worked with in developing new products.
A lot of similar imagery I created was for PubNub’s extensive blog.
For blogs & advertisements I created a variety of visual assets that could be reused in a variety of ways.
Early on we decided on using illustrations for visual items and stayed away almost entirely from photography mainly due to Covid-19 and lack of being able to set up shoots (and a desire to stay away from stock, which we later walked back some).
PubNub Connect 2021 Summit
The summit was a live and virtual conference for developers and product leaders. The goal was to gather video footage, B-roll, photography, and promotional material, while also connecting with a worldwide community of developers, engineers and product leaders.
Here is a panel of speakers discussing the future of virtual spaces (from left to right; Terry Storch - Life.Church, Guillaume Calot - Vonage, and Jon Kraft - Pandora)
Our VP of Product JP Shipherd speaking on the stage I developed with Metro Productions
Me on the sidelines, ready for trouble.
An example of posts created for the Summit, for both speakers and PubNub.
We thought we would address the often brought up fact that our name sounds like a particularly.
Over 4 dozen posts were created, some just general awareness development, others counting down to the date, or miscellaneous.
Case Studies and eBooks
The point of the case studies and ebooks is to provide in-depth scientific research, questions, data collection, analyzing the data, and presenting the results using an empirical method. But also it’s to drive inquisitive traffic to our site. Every quarter we compile approximately 4 case studies and 3 eBooks. Working with my content team I develop layouts for print and screen. Unfortunately some of that content can’t be display for confidentiality.