Digital Marketing— Natural Resources Defense Council

Project Overview
As a freelance designer for Natural Resource Defense Council, I worked with the Art Director to develop and distribute its brand guidelines with these goals in mind:
  • Make the rules visible to everyone inside and outside the team
  • Control versioning as colors and components evolved
  • Unite the designers under one piece of software
  • Enhance collaboration and visibility across teams
We had to do this without any development resources. I proposed creating an interactive brand guide and component library in Figma and shifting the design team there. This would improve collaboration, reduce versioning issues, and help alignment across the organization and with external vendors.

The department could house and edit styles and design elements alongside documentation, and easily distribute it internally and externally. The interactive prototypes allowed us to create a brand book with the look, interactivity and most of the functionality of a website.

Separately, I designed for social, email, OOH and banner ads. Find those samples below.

A note on process

1. Inventory
I conducted an extensive inventory, surveying social, print, presentations, event collateral, their new website UI and email.
2. Collaboration
I led meetings to resolve inconsistencies, align departments, establish best practices, and create a comprehensive style guide in Figma for internal and external use.
3. Migration
I laid out the documentation, making it interactive and website-like. We leveraged Figma’s file structure and component libraries, establishing platform-specific visual systems for future scalability.
RESEARCH
SYNTHESIS
DESIGN
MY RECOMMENDATIONS
LEARNINGS & FINAL THOUGHTS
I designed a simple, flexible framework to house documentation, examples, dos and don’ts, links, tips and components. This created collaboration and transparency across departments, and made onboarding easier.
I used UX best practices and interactive Figma components to create navigation and interactive samples. Feedback from the team guided how the guide was organized and how some components worked, making the guide more user friendly and immersive.
We leveraged nested components and boolean properties so designers could easily switch between brand-approved versions of logos and design elements. This prevented versioning and having to dig through a deep folder structure, and it kept spacing even.
We optimized the brand color palette for accessibility and light and dark modes in the process.
With the brand guidelines in place, the Multimedia department could unite more easily around a consistent look, even when colors and templates were in flux.

Digital & Event Design Samples

I designed for paid and organic social, creating new typography styles and templates, iterating on ideas and collaborating with the social and photo teams. Under the leadership of the Art Director, we expanded with the brand's visual language, experimenting with different grids, type and styles.

I collaborated with the video team on typography. We iterated on proportion and graphics using styles from our static graphics as a jumping off point.

We collaborated with Bonnaroo to create social content. I create original elements alongside their branding.

I designed branded swag for events, such as tees, tote bags, and other sustainable swag. I created mockups, worked with vendors and concepted and designed some original spot illustrations.

I concepted, researched and designed organic social media posts, iterating on typography while the brand standards were in flux.

I concepted and designed some OOH print collateral, such as protest posters, holiday cards and birthday cards. As always I pitched a few concepts and iterated on the designs given our printer and department constraints.

I developed logos and standards for NRDC and NRDC Action's sub-brands logos, based on a sketch from the Art Director. I defined guidelines for consistent application across channels covering variations, colors, sizes, and placement. I also created a set of plug-and-play components so future sub-brand logos could be iterated quickly and easily.

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