The Workback
Branding, interactive, art direction
The Workback
The Workback is a premier business magazine featuring original reporting, analysis, and interviews with fresh and bold insights on the new era of work. Geared toward enterprise executives, this publication explores the future of leadership by surfacing ideas that inspire the world’s most innovative organizations, leaders, and teams.
In my role as Brand Designer at Asana, I was the creative owner, lead designer, and art director on the brand new visual identity for The Workback. The look and feel of the new publication evoke the credibility of traditional business magazines with the modern elegance of innovative brands.
Art Direction, Branding, Interactive, and Lead Design by Hillary Chin
Branding and Design by Roger Hensley
Illustration by Jordan Bogash, Nick Levesque
Creative Direction by Chean Wei Law
Dev by Underground Digital
Editorial and Creative Direction by Nick Lucchesi
Background
The Workback is Asana’s brand agnostic digital publication about the future of work. As such, it was intentionally imagined as a distinctive sub-brand from the Asana parent brand, sharing the essence of the same core brand and visual DNA while maintaining its own editorial and unique look & feel.
It was essential that the new site feel like a sophisticated and human-centric digital magazine, not an average uninspiring corporate blog. Looking to editorial powerhouses like The New Yorker for inspiration, I led the development of a differentiated and striking creative direction based on 4 design principles.
Sophisticated & Premium
Like Forbes or Harvard Business Review, but warmer and fresher. Takes inspiration from a traditional publications to evoke the trust of a long-standing, well respected institution infused with a more modern look & feel.
Innovative & Inspiring
Forward-facing and cutting edge research-driven content and imagery to cement our place as thought leaders on the constantly changing modern workplace.
Human & Thought-provoking
A typography-driven, utilitarian, and architectural approach that puts the reading experience first through a minimalist, but thoughtful storytelling-focused identity.
Bold
An ahead-of-trend, confident, and colorful visual design that is unique from Asana.com, but feels part of the brand family.
Creating a sub-brand
The foundation of The Workback’s visual identity is type-centric with large, oversized headlines to make bold statements to foster an engaging reading experience and cultivate visual interest throughout a story. We introduced a secondary brand font, PP Editorial New, to compliment Asana’s primary typeface Gordita.
Building a design system from scratch
Working an in-house design career means you don’t necessarily get many opportunities to develop design systems from scratch. At large organizations, the opportunity can present itself in a reimagined company blog as a sleek digital publication in its own right. Roger Hensley, the other brand designer, and I worked under a hyperfast timeline like what most tech companies operate on. We workshopped the style explorations in 2 days and made quick decisions to move forward based on what felt most on-brief. This was after a few weeks of creating a brief, exploring design directions and concepts, and review meetings with editorial and development.
From there, I built the grid system, breakpoint templates, type styles, color palette and styles, UI and UX patterns, buttons, and all other design system components by scratch.
Story Modules
Content on The Workback website is expressed through a modular column grid that creates an optimal user experience across all screens, allows for flexibility in story hierarchies, and guides the reader seamlessly through the content offerings.
The story modules were built on Wordpress to ensure our editorial team partners could independently set up new articles and digital issues while adhering to brand guidelines.
Different sized story modules allow for many combinations to display content. Thanks to the modular grid, the homepage has the customizability to stay fresh and exciting every month with each issue launch.