JSTOR
Refreshing a beloved legacy brand
Over 30+ years, JSTOR has brought together academic and cultural institutions from around the world to help meet its mission to increase access to knowledge so more people can improve their lives through learning.
Before and after: A new brand expression and guided web experience delivers information relevant to each audience’s needs.
Early results are strong with an increase of 12% in YoY traffic, 6% in pageviews, 8% in engagement events, and 29% in form submissions.
The Website & Branding Refresh
Brand and Web Redesign Goals
Center our audience in the redesign. Leverage insights from partnerships within the academic librarianship community and through ongoing user experience research.
Extend the JSTOR brand beyond the content-based research platform to include the new Digital Stewardship Services collections processing platform.
Position JSTOR as the essential tech-driven solution within academic librarianship for both the stewards of academic materials, and the 81+ million researchers accessing those materials on jstor.org annually.
Educate the customer on the product benefits for thier role. And empower them to communicate to decision-makers with strategic content, eye-catching imagery, and memorable messaging for various stages in the buyer journey.
Website Specific
Major redesign to show full portfolio as one coherent story strenghten SEO, lead generation, and campaign support.
Improve traffic, pageviews, angagements and form submissions. Early results are strong: +12% YoY traffic (+13% new users), +6% pageviews, +8% engagement events, and +29% form submissions
Use human-centered design and user stories to create a focused experience that clearly communicates relevant benefits for each visitor and their leader/decision-makers.
Allow self-identification for intuitive user flow to role-specific resources.
Crisp communication: Text prioritizes one main takeaway. Images support text to communicate details in quick and memorable ways.
Efficient, Ongoing Execution
Bridge brand expression across marketing and product experiences with design systems, libraries, templates, messaging frameworks, and presentation templates.
Enable designers and writers (and non-designers and non-writers) with tools to quickly execute on-brand imagery and copywriting.
The newly redesigned marketing website redesign serves the various visitors and their needs through user stories. Here are key audience examples:
As an Resource Librarian, I want to see research materials that support our educators and students so that I can allocate my budget to best support student success.
As a Special Collections Librarian, I need to describe, manage, and safely post our institution's special collections of scholarly materials so that they are discovered by researchers.
As an Educator, I need a reliable and tech-forward research platform for teaching and learning so that I can help foster student success.
As a Student/Researcher, I need access to primary and secondary source materials specific to my area of research so that I can achieve my academic goals.
Step 1. Understanding our new audiences
JSTOR has deep knowledge of our research platform audiences through 30 years of partnerships with the community.
But, for this project we also needed an informed understanding our new Stewardship Services audiences. So, our research lead created a thorough study of 120 special collections and archive practitioners in the U.S. and abroad. These qualitative insights informed new personas and user stories which we used to guide the brand refresh and website redesign. See the Stewardship Services case study.
Step 2. Create Messaging
We created Messaging Frameworks to help writers consistently expedite downstream content and copywriting. The short- and long-form message options convey the value we deliver relevant to our various personas.
Research shows people scan text on screens rather than reading. We retain only a small amount of text-based information. So, our messaging is designed to be short and to the point with the key-takeaways at the top.
We also ensure the reader is able to understand the benefits so they can share then with managers and decision-makers.
Step 3. Audit the old brand
We audited the existing brand elements and assessed them against our redesign goals and relative return on investment. We focused on where we could make the biggest impact to make the brand more memorable and relevant for our audiences’ needs.
Step 4. Revise brand elements
The original color palette included several blues. We updated the palette and added two new shades to compliment the legacy red. Now the palette has depth and textural vibrancy to help it stand apart while also being instantly recognizable.
We kept our existing fonts and revised the typography by adding larger size variation, letter spacing, line height, and an expressive use of italics.
Step 5. Create, document, and publish easy to use systems
The brand libraries are in Figma, Adobe CC, and Canva. Easy-to-use templates for non designers are in Canva and Google Slides.
Improve speed and efficiency for design and development
Ensure consistency across digital and in person experiences
Maintain brand integrity
