Epic Brand Guide
Refreshing a Children's Reading Platform
Stock art made Epic's reading app feel dated and generic. I spearheaded a brand refresh initiative — establishing the visual tone, creating comprehensive guidelines, and collaborating closely with cross-functional teams.
The Challenge
Establishing a New Visual Identity
This spread marked the beginning of my efforts to visually conceptualize how the brand refresh could be portrayed in a layout. The exploration helped establish the level of attitude, confidence, and quirkiness that ultimately became the defining characteristics of the new brand identity.
Process
Early Explorations
Early-stage explorations for establishing the updated brand. I played with different styles, layouts, and messaging — getting messy with paints and markers along the way.
Brand Foundation
Colors & Typography
Working with the creative director and in-house originals team, I selected colors from our most popular series — then named each color after beloved characters and titles to reinforce brand connection.
Logo System
Brand Identity & Logo Evolution
When re-designing the logo I felt it was important to keep the old exclamation point because it visually and in search separated us from other brands with the name of epic. We built the logo to be flexible so we could alter it for different promotions.
Voice & Tone
Capturing Childlike Spirit
At the heart of this transformation was infusing the brand with attitude, confidence, and quirkiness. Collaborating with our in-house copywriter, I developed rough brushstroke typography that brought warmth and authenticity to our messaging.
The fill-in-the-blanks style encapsulates the balance of rough childlike hand writing with the clean starkness of our new brand font — representing childlike wonder and creativity while nodding to the educational aspect of the brand.
Visual Language
Signature Elements
I directed the creation of a dynamic swirl design to link characters from various original series — the colors came from analyzing our most popular content. The collage style, inspired by stickers on notebooks, became another core building block of the brand.
Photography Direction
Capturing Wonder
This pose ended up being an effective way to highlight books and show captivated kids full of wonder — looking up physically and metaphorically toward their dreams. One of the ways I balanced the chaos of the fun childlike messiness and a streamlined educational brand is by tracing the brand fonts on my iPad.
View the photoshoot case study
Applications
In Product & Marketing
A crucial part of the refresh was revamping how we showcase app screens and book covers. The goal: draw attention to books while emphasizing enjoyment through doodles and illustrations rather than text-heavy descriptions.
Results
Impact & Outcomes
The brand refresh played a key role in driving Epic's growth to become the world's largest digital reading platform for kids, engaging 75 million readers consuming over 1 billion books annually — ultimately leading to a successful acquisition.
Active readers on platform
Books read annually
Account creation lift from book page redesign