Helpful
As part of Scout Studio, I worked alongside a team of three designers and two developers on a rebrand and marketing site for Helpful. Helpful is a community enablement platform that encourages and celebrates altruism and real connections. Users are able to join groups and pose questions or offer help to others in those groups, as well as refer people from other groups to each other if they feel that someone’s ask can be best answered by a person outside the current group.
Process
When the cofounders of Helpful came to Scout they already had branding but were open to letting us revisit their brand. This is the initial logo lockup and color palette.
Helpful is really focused on interconnectedness and the overlapping of groups, so in a lot of our early sketches we went in a direction that involved a lot of simple geometric and abstract organic shapes to represent those company values. Ultimately, we ended up going in a more illustrative direction because we wanted to emphasize the friendly and human aspect of the brand. These are some preliminary versions of the homepage that I came up with as well as some early illustration style examples I made that eventually led to the final style we adopted.
Final Project
Our clients felt pretty strongly about their original hand logo and the bright purple color and we agreed, but we did make a few adjustments to the logo and color palette. We changed the typeface used in the logo lockup to Varela Round (a thinner, rounded-edge sans serif) in order to make the stroke weight between the type and hand icon feel more closely related and to give the logo an overall friendlier look. We also shifted the shades of the color palette and changed the two accent colors so that they felt bright and complimentary to the purple but didn't compete with the purple in terms of vibrancy.
We ended up using a lot of these illustrated shape people throughout the website/brand based on one of the very rough sketches I presented at one of our earlier working sessions.
Although the website was a collaborative effort, we each focused mostly on our own section of the site. I was tasked with creating the layout and illustrations for the About Page. This is the final Figma prototype I created as a blueprint for our developers. To view the rest of the pages, you can go to helpful.io because the site is now live (woohoo!).
For a more in-depth look at the Helpful brand, flip through our virtual brand book.
