Ramped – McCurdy Studios

Case Study

Ramped

Founded in 2020 by Manoj, Mitch, and Danny out of their extensive experience in the antiquated and inequitable job market. Ramped is a career discovery platform built to help job seekers elevate their skillsets and find the job of their dreams. Through Ramped's platform, job seekers can do away with the mass-applying mindset and target their dream jobs with confidence knowing their resumés won't be just one more on the stack.

Project Services

Brand Strategy
Visual Identity
Brand Illustration
Communication Design

Section 01

The Challenge

Ramped's success has shown that they are the trailblazing start-up taking on today's antiquated job-market process and turning it on its head. The problem was that Ramped didn't have a brand strategy and design that embodied the confidence and success that matched their product's success. So the challenge for the Ramped project was: "How can we take our brand of today and turn it into something confident, refreshing that empowers today's job seekers?

Section 02

The Solution

Establishing the Foundation

In creating a brand that truly resonates with a target audience, you must go beyond just the visual aspects. A brand is more than just a logo at the top of your website. To kick off the project, I threw it back to the beginning of Ramped and sat down with the founders to dive in deep on the founding of Ramped. Breaking down the brand into foundational elements allows us to build out brand blocks that we can build upon - elements such as Mission and Vision. Throughout the rest of the strategy and design process, I utilize the content produced in this first phase as guiding points - creating the first steps towards building a brand built around formed decisions.

Creating Visual Confidence

Ramped's challenge centered around taking their existing brand elements and refining them to create a visual language that captivated new job seekers while not isolating their current community and partners. I walked through an audit across all of Ramped's brand channels to find out what was working and what wasn't. Using the finding from the brand audit, I created multiple design iterations that solved Ramped's challenge. The visual design focused on developing a more robust typography hierarchy and a fully built-out color system and shifting the brand away from stock photography as its visual anchor toward an illustrative approach.

Typography Hierarchy

The typography system brings powerful confidence into play with Loos Extra Wide Bold - a geometric typeface that depends on attention and isn't afraid to put itself on full display. With no lack of confidence in the header typeface - the workhorse typeface of Bariol helps to ground the system in experience and respect.

Color System

A strong color system can be one of a brand's most impactful and ownable parts. When done right, it breathes life into everything the brand touches. With Ramped, we knew we liked the existing colors, but they needed more substantial assistance from supportive colors. This color palette provides flexibility in Ramped's visual design to create high-impact electric designs for one design and a calmer, more educated design for the next.

Brand Illustration

For the brand illustrations, we knew we wanted to bring a minimalistic and shape-driven approach to the work. These illustrations now work as the main visual elements in the designs in this new system. The illustrations had the strength to be the main piece of a design and play background characters when needed.