Building a more inclusive, inviting Linkedin

2 minute read

To help better represent and serve its diverse community, we led Linkedin through a two-year transformation of its brand. Now Adweek walks through the process — and what’s next for Linkedin.

Two years of planning went into today’s introduction of a refreshed brand for LinkedIn, highlighted by changes to its logo, typography, colors and shapes.

However, members of the professional network won’t notice the new look quite yet, as LinkedIn is using its new branding site to debut the changes, which were also implemented on the welcome page for people who aren’t members or are signed out. The new elements will roll out incrementally across its platform.

The rebranding effort, internally code-named Project Otis, began two years ago, and VP of Brand Marketing and Corporate Communications Melissa Selcher believes it is working. She noted in a blog post on LinkedIn’s branding site that BrandZ named LinkedIn as one of the 10 fastest-growing brands in the U.S. last month, and the professional network reached No. 37 on its global list.

“We really understand what our members and customers need from us,” Selcher told Adweek. “They want us to be telling the stories and doing the things we’re doing in the world. For 16 years, we’ve had the same vision and the same mission. They wanted us to tell that story in a more human, more consistent, more approachable way.”

Project Otis was a co-owned initiative with LinkedIn’s product and user-design teams and a companywide effort. “This was not just a marketing exercise. I think a lot of brand evolutions fall short when it’s just driven as a marketing or brand exercise,” said Selcher. “What we were telling the world was really real, and not a façade. In this day and age, people can sniff out anything that is not real and authentic. We said internally that what we needed to do was turn LinkedIn inside-out. We didn’t need to make anything up.”

As for the new branding elements being introduced today, the company “chose a warmer color palette, designed a tone of voice that was conversational and professional and chose shapes that were organic and round,” said LinkedIn executive creative director Kevin Frank.

The professional network’s refreshed logo incorporates the new colors and shapes. LinkedIn also designed a new custom typeface, called Community, which uses rounded letter forms, echoing the circles and rectangles in its new shapes. The trademark LinkedIn blue is still featured, but the new color palette complements it, rather than highlighting it. And the new system of shapes was inspired by the circles and rectangles that make up the letter I in the LinkedIn logo.

On the social media side, Selcher wrote in the blog post, “Our social handles now have a LinkedIn voice, engaging followers with thoughtful and timely conversations and links to interesting jobs and experiences. And it’s working. Our members are sharing their stories, asking for and giving help, and after just one quarter, engagement rates have more than doubled across LinkedIn and Twitter.”

Photography is a key part of LinkedIn’s rebranding, as the professional network set out to develop a gallery of documentary-like images in the style of National Geographic, featuring real people in their real work environments. The resulting library contains thousands of images.

“There’s nothing more powerful than a picture of a person.” said Frank. “Stock photography all looks the same—happy smiling people in conference rooms, high-fiving in ways that don’t feel natural. It’s not that people don’t experience moments of joy at work, but we really wanted to make sure we portrayed those moments authentically and showed moments of anxiety and stress and disappointment.”

LinkedIn made its first foray into television ads with a spot during the Oscars in 2016, and its In It Together campaign — which debuted during another awards show, the 2018 Golden Globes — has been the backbone for Project Otis.

Tell us what you think about Linkedin’s new direction.

The Design Conference and the state of our creative industry

4 minute read

Recently, Managing Director Amanda Munilla was invited as a keynote speaker to The Design Conference (TDC) in Brisbane. In its ninth year, the conference brought together a vibrant community of established design professionals, independent designers and artists, as well as students in high school and university via the TDC Futures platform. The conference is unique in its focus on the ‘story behind the story’ — encouraging presenters to tell their personal stories and discuss the challenges and successes they’ve seen in their careers. After three days of unpacking the dynamics shaping the creative industry, Amanda shares five key themes that emerged from this year’s conversations:

Solving from all sides
In my keynote, “You can sit with us: A strategist at the design table,” I shared my experience of growing up in this industry as a strategist — cultivating yourself as an interdisciplinary thinker and learning the value of partnership between strategy and design. At Wolff Olins, we say our biggest metrics of success are making work that’s commercially viable, creatively distinct and culturally impactful, both within the organizations and out in the world. To do that, we have to bring specific expertise but also a wide worldview.

In an industry where we’ve all seen the same case studies, we have to constantly push ourselves to bring new thinking to the table. A huge part of that is combining collective experiences and points of view. One of the things I loved about TDC was the exploration of design in all its forms (defining design broadly, or what we sometimes call ‘big D’ design). We heard from strategists, graphic designers, product designers, illustrators, venture studios — you name it. It takes all of those types of thinking to crack the business and societal challenges we all see in the world.

Money vs. creativity
At TDC, I sat on a panel called, “How can we get paid more to do what we love?” On the panel with me was Chris Do of Blind and The Futur, a platform that helps people learn the business of design. As a designer and educator, Chris is known for his outspoken views on making money in design. Joining us was Mercedes Bazan, an amazing illustrator who’s earlier in her career. She spoke candidly about balancing her personal projects and developing her own profile while working full-time with Stripe in San Francisco.

A lot of the discussion and questions centered on the balance between making things you love and seeking client work to either build your bottom line or establish your profile. One salient piece of advice was to write the briefs you want to work on. By creating things that answer a need or help demonstrate your point of view as a designer, you can build your portfolio even before you build your client base.

Instagram-able content above all?
One notable feature of all big public events these days is the desire to make content shareable. In a scroll-by environment, having content that captures the key ideas onscreen is essential not only to getting your point across in your presentation, but to making it Instagram-worthy. The primacy of shareable content has downsides, but one of the upsides in my experience is that making things 'shareable' forces you to brutally edit and boil down the narrative to its sharpest ideas. (Special thanks to our Creative Director Chris Kline for making my presentation a standout on stage. One presenter even mentioned that he redid his slides after seeing ours!)

An interesting observation that emerged was how making content for social sharing has ushered in a return of typography on screen. Images don’t always reproduce exactly how we want them in that kind of capture. But a pithy phrase is made for sharing. In fact, designers like Adam JK and Martina Martian have built huge followings sharing this kind of expression in social.

Women to the front
We heard from some amazing speakers, which included some exceptional female leaders. Sarah Sampsel from Work & Co., Yasmin Naghavi from Media Arts Lawyers, Prue Jones from Fjord and Mirella Marie from Studio Vertigo to name a few. In addition to her own studio, Mirella also founded Womentor, an international mentor program for female designers where I currently serve as a mentor.

We talked a lot about how to support and grow great talent in the creative industry. I fielded a question onstage about Wolff Olins’ prominent female leadership — from Sairah as CEO to the Managing Directors of our three hubs. I shared that I am absolutely proud of the merits of our leadership team, but that the search for diversity of thought never stops at gender or with a few visible leaders. See above about ‘solving from all sides’!

Burning the candle, carrying the torch
Maybe the biggest theme at TDC was the state of mental health and wellbeing in the creative industry. Andy Wright of Streamtime and Never Not Creative has built a career in branding and knows a thing or two about deadlines and client pressures. He presented a study Never Not Creative undertook with social purpose organization UnLtd and the mental health nonprofit Everymind. The rates of stress, depression and anxiety among creatives they found were truly astounding. Just as Never Not Creative is leading that movement in the Australian design community, back stateside, I recommend checking out platforms like Made of Millions who are mainstreaming this conversation.

Both as practitioners and managers, it is imperative that we examine what we’re asking of our teams and ourselves. I think we have so much work to do, but if there’s an industry who knows how to design better solutions, this is it. We might just need more sleep and vacation first.

All photography courtesy of Callie Marshall

Sairah Ashman on how businesses can engage and hire diverse teams

5 minute read

I run a global business entirely dependent on its talent, secure in the knowledge that without their intellectual horsepower and creative curiosity (and a little secret sauce) we don’t have a business. I mean this quite literally; it’s just IT, nice furnishings and a few exotic plants otherwise.

We’re a creative business that relies on diversity, and not just because it’s a nice box to tick. As Channel 4 has known and championed for many years through campaigns such as "We're the Superhumans," it’s a source of competitive advantage.

Creativity and diversity have long been a source of advantage for the UK more broadly in fostering innovation and experimentation and we must protect these assets as we continue to navigate the choppy waters of Brexit.

A disastrous outcome for the UK will be a narrowing of diversity in the talent pool we can access and a silent march towards homogeneity. Senior executives tell me that once they’ve overcome the challenges that initial Brexit reconfiguration will bring, it’s this narrowing they fear most.

PwC indicates that ‘diversity-leading’ organisations are more innovative; they’re rated by their leaders as more agile, and more likely to ‘experiment and embrace failure’. Similarly, the latest research from Boston Consulting Group says that diverse companies produce 19% more revenue.

Not many of us (even parliament it seems) can predict what’s next with Brexit. We don’t yet know what the impact will be on hiring beyond our own borders. However, there are a few simple steps we can pursue to ensure we celebrate, encourage and propagate diversity.

Recognise (and improve on) what you have

The old adage says what gets measured gets managed. It’s impossible to tell how diverse and innovation-ready you are without taking a stock check.

We recently undertook our own internal audit looking at a range of measures including gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, physical and mental health attributes. For many years we focused on cognitive and cultural diversity as a business — people who thought differently from different parts of the world — believing this was a good catch all. However, we found we gravitated towards a mean if we weren’t careful, finding it hard to separate what was a good cultural fit versus a more general hiring bias. We attracted wonderfully smart, engaging people, but it became obvious over time that they’d largely been educated in the same institutions.

Once you start digging, be prepared to be surprised by how diverse your people already are and curious as to why they can’t be more open if they’re managing something such as dyslexia, depression or epilepsy. Anyone with a ‘condition’, who comes from an ‘alternative’ background or doesn’t fit the ‘norm’ will most likely be highly resourceful and resilient – they’ve had no other option. It also means they probably have more potential than others might realise, with a lot of energy being spent maintaining what passes for ‘normal’ (a minority category if ever there was one) that could be more productively directed elsewhere.

With a benchmark identified, it’s easier to target improvements, as well as timescales for doing so. Focus on a couple of key initiatives and then review what works most effectively, rather than trying to do everything at once.

If you’re looking for motivation, one example of a company outperforming the competition on diversity is Slack. It’s excelled where other Silicon Valley types have fallen, with its statistics showing steady improvement. Employees say the company makes diversity everyone’s responsibility, rather than simply appointing a Head of Diversity and making it their remit (although you could do both).

Be vocal about commitment from the very top

Like many aspects of organisational culture, most cues are taken from the top, so leadership behaviour and action really matter.

I remember as a junior many years ago when a new cohort of directors were appointed where I worked – they comprised 10% of the business and there was not a single woman among them, despite several obviously strong candidates. It spoke volumes, devaluing the promotions and reflecting poorly on leadership at the time. Lack of diversity breeds more of the same without active intervention and often happens unconsciously.

A good example of proactivity is how some businesses support campaigns that chime with its employees’ beliefs. Vodafone is a vocal champion of LGBT+ rights and overhauled HR processes to both attract and empower LGBT+ talent. The Vodafone LGBT + Friends Network was recognised by Stonewall as the best of its kind in the UK. And it’s not just about the internal landscape. Its products reflect its beliefs, with trans-inclusive policies for customers, and it hosts Pride parade floats. Crucially, none of this feels performative given that these values are baked in.

Taking this one step further, some CEOs demonstrate their personal convictions in a way that was unheard of a decade ago. Look at Quantas CEO, Alan Joyce, who topped a leaders' list for backing same-sex marriage in Australia. He took a very public stance in favour of LGBT+ marriage and was even attacked by a pie-wielding bystander for his views. Meanwhile, Edward Enninful, Vogue UK’s editor-in-chief, has put diversity at the heart of Vogue’s agenda, working to ‘normalise the marginalised’ for its readers, and sales are up.

If you want employees to value openness, empowerment and diversity, there’s no better way of promoting that than by leading from the top.

Put your money where your mouth is

Measurement and celebration are laudable but after that, action is needed.

Consider your hiring process, for a start. This takes time, significant investment, and some trial and error. Some processes intended to make recruitment fairer have backfired and accidentally propagated existing biases. (This is what happened at Amazon when it tried using AI for recruitment, and ended up favouring men.) Other techniques, like blind CVs, have had better results. Recruiters in Sweden have even been using a robot to interview candidates to help eliminate bias. This kind of thing isn’t available to all of us of course, but we each have a responsibility to think about what can be done and what will make a difference.

Next, consider the way you nurture dialogue and debate. Opposing views, delivered in the right way, are incredibly useful and ultimately positive, as they create depth and rigour. Do you proactively seek them? Do you invite, and listen to, opinions that aren’t the same as yours? How do you drive that at a company-wide level?

If businesses can recognise the diversity they have, be vocal about it, and pioneer an open-minded approach in their workplace culture, we can reduce the threat Brexit poses to our diversity - which we need to drive innovation and to thrive commercially, and economically. It’s on us to prove that, despite the political turmoil, we’re still open for business.

Stay tuned for Sairah’s next Forbes article.

Recap: London Tech Week 2019

3 minute read

As part of Tech Week, we hosted a breakfast conversation about the role technology plays in our industry. Here, Strategy Director Paddy has captured our key takeaways from the session.

With our brains full of pastry, sugar and caffeine, Emma Barratt, Creative Director and Head of Design at Wolff Olins, kicked us off with a quick, provocative intro.

Emma asked us: “how, in a world where brands are becoming truly interactive through new technologies like MR and AI, can we still shape brands that are recognisable, relevant and – crucially – responsible? What happens when brands become invisible?”

Four speakers then shared their thoughts, each from very different places, each spinning a different thread but ultimately weaving together in a similar direction…

First, Cedric Kiefer from Onformative suggested that the invisible is unknown, so can be scary. But he thinks we should embrace that, focusing on the how – on the journey, the A-to-B, rather than just the B. Which doesn’t mean thinking about the tech first. Instead, he suggested we use tech to help us avoid the direct route, because “the direct route is obvious.” Experimenting with new tech, we can do things differently – arriving at various different and perhaps surprising Bs.

Pip Jamieson from The Dots carried this thought on, passionately inspiring us all to think about how “it’s the differences that make us brilliant.” She made the point that tech and data can help people, but aren’t enough alone. Alone, “data can’t innovate” – certainly not in the long-term. So if we want long-term innovation and successful, sustainable organisations, we should look to people. We should design for and with communities, avoiding bias by building teams full of difference – recognising that “creativity is a team sport.”

Dan Hennessy from Uber then asked the question “how can you humanise this thing in your ear?” – what does ‘brand personality’ mean in the world beyond screens? Do brands have actual personalities now, and if so how? Across which touchpoints? He wondered how we can use the technology available to us to “facilitate our journey” through this “expanding world” – to not just sell to people, but to help them, using the example of Uber commandeering ad spaces in airports to help customers find their rides.

Finally, Daniel Hirschmann from Tech Will Save Us and Hirsch & Mann spoke about working “design-first, then tech.” His point being that if we’re trying to keep up with and include all the new tech in the work we’re doing, we’re missing the point. We should see technologies like AI as “mediums for expression,” exploring what they are capable of – how they can help us design better experiences for people, wherever those experiences may happen.

So in summary, our speakers were all thinking similarly – about how we can harness the power of tech for people. This led us to pose three questions:

1. Can we stop worrying about tech doing different things to us, and instead wield tech to do things differently? And do better things – things that have longer-term impact, are unbiased, community-first and ultimately core to who we are. Rather than doing things led either by a fear of the latest tech, or a desire to use it just because it’s there.

So:

2. How can we augment our reality, to better augment our customers’ reality? How can we work with and alongside technology, to shape better brands and a better world?

And then:

3. How will we continue to work with technologies as they evolve from being things we can use to express, to things that can express by themselves? As they start to behave in ways that we don’t expect, in black boxes, beyond our control. What will that mean for how we shape brands?

Ultimately, we wondered whether Tech Week needed a rebrand… Whether we needed to stop thinking of ‘tech’ as this ‘thing’, on a pedestal, separate from us, and instead recognise it as the latest powerful set of tools, or perhaps a new member of the team – helping us to think differently, work better together, and ultimately be better for people.

Share your thoughts on tech x design with us.