FORGE BRAND + DESIGN SYSTEM
Building the brand foundation to support the digital transformation of the physical trades
CHALLENGE
As the head of product design at Forge, I had the responsibility of establishing the brand strategy for a budding startup and ensuring that our design system helped us moved faster together. When I joined, I inherited a loose set of design guidelines and a logo. By the time I left, I had established a memorable brand, scalable guidelines and a foundational design system to be shared priority design, marketing and engineering.
DETAILS
With the mission to build and power the next-generation trades community, Forge needed a brand strategy and visual language that would feel equally at home in the field as it would on an AI-powered virtual reality device. Our team took a thoughtful approach to building the strategy and design foundation to support a trusted brand and scalable suite of tools.
We defined the brand guidelines after finalizing the company name and logo, focusing on building a cohesive and recognizable identity. This included crafting the tagline, establishing the visual direction, and setting a consistent voice and tone. These foundational elements set the stage for the core digital assets and evolved into a fully functioning design system to support scalability across platforms.
Core outputs included:
Tagline/slogan plus the visual look and feel (colors, typography, imagery)
Brand guidelines document
Core digital elements and a fully functioning design system
ROLE
Role / Design Director, Project Manager
Team / CXO, Director of Marketing
Brand Strategy and Visual Design
Before digging into the visual concept and design language, we iterated on the mission, vision, and tagline to ground our company as a whole. This included weeks of field observations, team interviews, paper sketches and white boarding to get to the root of who we were as a people-focused brand.
Once we aligned on our core mission statement and tagline, our goal became clear: build a brand that feels incredibly human. Weeks of experimentation in several directions led us to the visual concept below:
MISSION STATEMENT
Our mission is to build and power the next-generation trades worker.
VISION STATEMENT
Forge will be the largest trades employer in the world.
Brand Guidelines
From visual guidelines to marketing materials
Building the design system, Foundational
While I don’t have access to the design system files any longer, below is a recreation of select components to showcase the level of variations we were able to build. Components were built within an atomic system, where we renamed each section to align with the trades – instead of Atoms, we had Nuts & Bolts, and in place of Molecules we Structures.
We also created an illustration component library to make it easier for product and creative designers to build unique illustrations within the design system, a core element of our visual design.
Outcome
In parallel with the building of the design system and component/illustration library, I worked with our four-person design team to adapt the new visual design and components across all existing designs and product experiences. This included, most prominently, our website redesign, scheduling app and pro app experiences.
