I’ve worked with the digital Marketplace for two and a half years, providing visual solutions for campaigns, challenges, social media, and various other tasks – both in and out of the Marketing department.
During that period, I had a crucial role in developing the company’s identity and defining a clear and consistent visual strategy for them. The brand book is a result of it all.
BeatStars
Creative Director & Graphic Designer
Erin Foster, Grabiel Bo, Ricardo Schuster, Scott Middler
From BeatStars, to live shows, to new products and sub-brands — as the graphic designer of the company I had a hand in setting the tone of voice for most of the campaigns and releases BeatStars offered since the start of the Marketing Department in early 2020.
After multiple tries at a rebranding for a consistent look, with several different perspectives and tastes influencing the decisions, the common term was to use the company’s products as the visual basis for external assets.
The original logo lacked several design rules that made its implementation harder, and thus, was updated with the correct lines.
Once the basis was set, all colors and fonts were repurposed for all assets and kept in mind each platform’s use.
Since the two sub-brands functioned closely with BeatStars’ tone of voice, the visual branding took the company’s original direction as the same base.
In contrast with the platform that focused on the buyer, Studio was the vendor’s platform — to illustrate this contrast, the visual branding revolved around a light theme instead.
Beyond the brands, BeatStars had a multitude of initiatives. Aside from BeatStars World and the Academy — for which I only supported with thumbnails, covers, and other graphic assets — I was able to set the tone for all other programs of the company: Beats4Love, Campus Marketing Program, BeatStars Hubs, BeatStars Live, BeatStars Originals / Best Beats on YouTube, and Pay The Creator.
All of the company’s visual assets took inspiration from the platform – text styles, iconography, music player elements, and much more. By having the platform as branding’s basis, every piece of content had a consistent visual alignment and a sense of familiarity with the marketplace.
The company released content for BeatStars, BeatStars Publishing, BBOY, Live, and Academy daily, leading to an average of +120 deliverables each week for just that. Other regular assets included Newsletters and Playlists.
Most of the content was repetitive, visually, allowing creatives to work off of templates created by ourselves — some of which were on Canva, to provide non-creatives some level of self-sufficiency when needed.
For over half of my time at BeatStars, I was the sole Graphic Designer and needed to ensure the team could function in case I were absent. To secure this, I had easy-to-follow templates and an organized directory of all necessary files for the whole company (logos, templates, presentations, etc.).
During my time at the company, I’ve led the creative team through various campaigns, was left in charge of +25 challenges and contests’ branding, and was the lead designer for playlists, digital ads and OOH, merchandise, and any other design projects that came our way.
