web & digital designer at chmura

Before I made any moves on reworking the website, I spent time understanding the scope of the industry and the competitive landscape. The clear differentiator that I found between Chmura and the competition was the expertise that Chmura's consultants brought to the table. Working with Chmura — whether by using JobsEQ software or by working with consultants — is a more intimate, white-glove experience than working with competitors.

I wanted to reflect this by elevating the brand elements and making them a little more sophisticated. I also wanted to maintain the brand equity we had already built and continue appealing to that audience while also establishing the company as a strong, modern contender in the tech industry.

I am not a logo designer by any means, but I knew that refreshing the brand meant I needed to elevate the logos, too. Big reasons for this were to improve the contrast in the Chmura logo against light backgrounds, and to modernize the JobsEQ software logo to keep us competitive in the B2B tech space.

I love designing icons, and I think a great way to elevate a web or design experience is with a custom icon library. There are so many ways to have fun with iconography, and it's always a fun design challenge to come up with something that's both unique and instantly recognizable.

Once I had a collection of fonts, colors, graphic styles that I'd tested and was comfortable building a brand with, I compiled them into a style guide and socialized the changes with leadership and the rest of the company.

Once I had the brand refresh established, socialized, and approved, I went to work on the website. My official goal with this redesign was to create a website that doubled inbounds year over year, and my personal goal was to build a website that could compete in the B2B tech space.

There were a couple key strategies at play here. I wanted to simplify the message on each page, partly as a means of implementing keyword optimization tactics, and partly as a means of providing the site visitor with exactly the information they're seeking. As we develop a content marketing strategy, having specific pages will help us curate that user journey through the funnel.

There's always room for growth with organic, but the exciting piece about working on Chmura's website was that their main competitors did not have websites built with organic strategy in mind. The flip side of this was that our organic competitors were not necessarily our business competitors — "labor market data" search volume isn't huge to begin with, and in many cases we found that our SERP competition was the US Bureau of Labor Statistics or the US Census Bureau, for example. So this was a new perspective on organic strategy that I hadn't worked with or had to tackle before.

Information architecture is so much fun because it's the intersection of SEO and UX, and the easier a designer can make it to navigate a website, the more positive regard a site visitor will have for the website, and by extension, the product. Good information architecture on a website proves to a prospective client that the company can provide answers or solutions easily, which is the crux of what people seek when they're looking to make purchases of any kinds — whether B2B or B2C.

For the Chmura website, I restructured the header and footer navigations and created templatized product and solutions pages, partially to streamline the crawling process for search engines and partially to create a sense of familiarity and consistency across the website for visitors.

As a designer, I love technical SEO because it's the thing that everyone always overlooks — and it can really move the needle when people start paying attention. Most of my technical SEO work has been in creating sitemaps, designing and producing sites that are responsive for mobile, reducing page load speed with lighter code and smaller images, and performing mid- to large-scale redirect audits.

As the sole graphic designer for the company, I got to help out with myriad projects that I hadn't been exposed to previously — everything from in-person events to social media graphics, data visualization, and corporate slide decks.

To support in-person events, I designed banner stands, one-pagers, promotional postcards, and pop-up booth covers. I also designed a sub-brand for our annual user conference, using two of our secondary colors to support the new name — Current.

I designed graphics specifically for LinkedIn, often to promote conferences we'd be tabling at, highlight our Client of the Month, or feature an aspect of our software. For Current-specific posts, like speaker announcements or ticket promotions, I used the sub-branding I developed.

As the sole graphic designer for the company, I got to help out with myriad projects that I hadn't been exposed to previously — primarily with data visualization, but also with materials for in-person events.