The Challenge

After 15 years in business, Teal Media—a woman-founded, women-led creative agency partnering with nonprofits on brands, websites, and digital marketing—had outgrown its visual identity. The agency’s expertise, sophistication, and client roster had evolved significantly, but the brand hadn’t kept pace. The rebrand needed to honestly reflect who Teal had become: a trusted strategic partner to some of the most consequential mission-driven organizations in the country.

Designing for your own organization, where everyone has a stake in the outcome, is a huge challenge! It required a different kind of rigor and facilitation than client work.

My Role

I was brought in as Art Director across the full scope of the rebrand—participating in discovery, co-developing the creative brief, leading visual identity development, and carrying the new brand through every touchpoint: style guide, collateral, swag, conference booth, and the website. Over the course of a year, I held the creative vision and ensured the new identity translated consistently from strategy to execution.

Discovery

The discovery process was comprehensive, combining an internal company-wide survey (led by others on the team) with external research that I participated in, including a competitive market analysis, audience calls, and background materials review. The discovery process concluded with a comprehensive creative brief and website plan.

Brand Art Direction

Working from the creative brief, I art directed the visual identity development and guided the design process from initial concepts through finalization. The goal was a brand that felt confident, warm, and sophisticated: an agency that takes the craft seriously and genuinely cares about the missions it serves. For the typographic system, we paired Tiempos Display—an elegant and contemporary typeface—with National—a workhorse font that is simple, humble, yet distinctive. The pairing carries authority without coldness. The core color palette was an evolution of Teal’s original teal brand colors, and we selected a secondary palette to give the creative team more flexibility to stretch the brand across digital, print, and other applications.

I worked closely with our design team to develop the style guide and extend the brand across every touchpoint—collateral, digital marketing templates, slide deck templates, swag design, conference booth design, and more.

Website Design

Working from wireframes developed by another UX designer on the team, I led the design for the full website—establishing the visual language of the site and setting the style system that governed how the new brand lived and continued to evolve on the web.

We had to consider how the typographic system would extend on the website, how the color palette should work across components, and how the graphic language would carry across a wide range of page types from the homepage to case studies to service pages, and more.

The Outcome

The rebrand gave Teal a visual identity and web presence that finally matched the agency’s 15+ years of expertise and the caliber of its client work. Internally, it provided the team with a coherent, well-documented system—style guide, templates across Figma and Google, and design standards to express the brand consistently across every context.

Credits

Designed at Teal Media
Lead Strategist: Aruna Mall
UX Designer: Ryan Co
Front-end Developer: Alan Greene
Back-end Developer: Jason Yovanoff, Austin Whipple
Brand Designer: Ellen Yee
Design Support: Diego Beauroyre
‍Project Manager: Will Houston