After our successful Hackday and CAMP branding engagements, LinkedIn’s Employee Experience team approached us with a fresh challenge. They were developing a new talent leadership event series to help companies enrich their cultures by sharing best practices from LinkedIn’s own culture development. This being a brand new endeavor, however, the team needed a brand identity to support it.

For such an important event, we knew we needed to design a brand identity that was meaningful, impactful, and unique—and still meshed with LinkedIn’s larger brand identity. Also, knowing the identity would be applied for a variety of use-cases, we wanted it to be comprehensive yet flexible.

Our first challenge in creating the identity was actually naming the event and finding the right tagline. The LinkedIn team wanted something that was aspirational but also conveyed the nature of the event—an ambitious but achievable task. After a deep discovery phase to understand the vision for the event, we embarked on many collaborative rounds of brainstorming and iteration between our teams. We started with a wordcloud of around a hundred name options, then narrowed it down through each iteration, presenting name options along with our background thinking. This gave the LinkedIn team the context and perspective needed to narrow it down to the final selection:

The name: CultureMark

The tagline: “Make yours.”

With this foundation, we started work on the visual identity. While we had a fair amount of creative freedom, we were challenged to maintain consistency with LinkedIn’s new visual identity. That meant everything from logo to typography needed to extend the existing design system. Ultimately, we were able to do this successfully, providing the team with easy-to-use brand guidelines and designed assets ready for promotion.

Through close listening and constant communication, we were able to create a visual identity that embodies the values and focus of the event series while still working well with LinkedIn’s existing brand guidelines. In addition, the digital asset system we provided proved to be a critical tool that enabled branded assets to be easily replicated in a variety of applications. This enabled the LinkedIn Employee Engagement team to create additional assets while maintaining a consistent look and feel across every channel.

“They were cutting-edge and creative but knew how to balance something corporate with personality and verve. They also made it very fun. The experience was great; there was a lot of laughing and some singing. They were also very receptive to feedback.”

—Nawal Fakhoury
Senior Manager of Employee Experience, LinkedIn