Late 2016 - New typography

In late 2016 our license for Helvetica on the site was coming to an end. I was tasked to evaluate a new typeface for the website. There was no budget for this so I was limited to open source or free to license fonts. The company had just paid for 2 premium print-only typefaces, Sentinel and Benton Sans, and I wanted to find something that lived in the same wheelhouse as those.

I looked at a lot of options but whittled it down to three finalists, Libre Franklin, Source Sans, and Open Sans

2017 - Redfin Design Language

In Summer of 2017, myself and another designer initiated work to give Redfin's digital brand a much needed update.

Up to that point, tweaks had been made here and there without much thought, resulting in a loose, incoherent system of colors, typography, illustration, and overall style. We started from the very beginning with defining Redfin's brand archetype.  We then built upon that archetype with principles that set us apart from other services. These informed the designs directly. I was primarily responsible for the typography and color, and collaborated closely on the ui components and flows. 

Archetype - the caregiver

Right on the edge of stability and connection sits The Caregiver. Redfin's message has always been about service and putting the customer first, so Caregiver was a natural fit. I tried to make Sage and Magician work since Redfin does carry elements of them within their brand—data advantage being very "Sage like" and Redfin Agents working like magicians on many deals—but at the core is the service.

Design Principles

I put together a doc for our process once we had figured out our brand archetype. Directly inspired by Beyond Design Inc.'s Strategic pyramid for visual brand design. Redfin already had our differentiators—Advocacy, Technology, and Value—and we felt they fit well with Caregiver. Our next step was to define the principles that our designers would use as direction in their everyday work. 

Elements

Once we defined the principles the last, but most time consuming stage was changing the elements. Color, typography, spacing, hierarchy, flow, and much more all had to be revisited. The incoherent mess we had all throughout the product, and the sheer surface area of the product was initially hard to deal with.

An acute area of color variety is the home card sashes. We usertested our current color system and we not too surprised that users didn't understand what the different colors meant. We relied too heavily on the colors to encode information and weren't communicating the information elsewhere in the UI. In addition, the brand red and “for sale” green was particularly difficult for users with color-vision deficiencies.

Explorations

During this process I switched jobs and wasn’t able to directly move the work forward. However during the elements design phase, I proposed an overall shift to warmer colors, use of the brand serif, and hand illustrated elements. All of these changes point back to the original personality and principles. My hope is to one day see the work become a reality.