Villanova University Brand DNA digital publication

Responsibilities: Art direction, layout, production art, research

One of the services Pearson Online Learning Services provides to its partners is the creation of what we call a Brand DNA digital publication. In this asset, multiple teams such as design, copy, SEO and CRO will focus on one or two programs we support for a university and conduct research on our university partner’s brand performance, as well as the competitive marketplaces they operate in. We provide a deep dive into our partner’s programs and how they contrast with their competitors. We provide succinct guidance on what our partner’s strengths and weaknesses are, how we will position their brand, and offer suggestions to improve the marketing performance of their programs in the future. This asset also serves as a quick reference for our teams working on the University’s brand.

As the designer assigned to this project, my first task was to collect research on the creative being used by our competitors, analyze the trends I observed therein, and come up with suggestions for Villanova. These findings were then handed to the marketing and brand manager for this partner to review and choose what thoughts might be viable for Villanova. When content was finalized, I was also responsible for the complete design and production of the publication. A key change I brought to this project as compared to previous DNA’s Pearson had created was to push to focus on the digital experience of PDF, as opposed to maintaining many of the traditional trappings of a print booklet. I made the choice to embrace the real estate a horizontal screen allows, and I pushed the team to reconfigure the document’s content structure and flow. We restricted the main body of the publication to our findings alone, and pushed the drier research and reference materials to the end of the document in an appendix. I also implemented multiple in-document links and PDF bookmarks to allow a reader to navigate the content more like a website.