BUILDING FOR
WHO
SPROUT IS BECOMING
SPROUT SOCIAL — BRAND DESIGN LEADERSHIP
brand architecture, design systems, design leadership
Sprout Social grew from a single social media tool into a multi-product platform with a new category to claim. Along the way, a brand refresh gave it a new foundation—a new persona, new tenets, a new look.
Across my roles at Sprout, my job was making sure the brand held up as the company raced to keep pace with its market. That meant putting it in people’s hands, building the structure it needed to grow, and holding the bar on every piece of work.
THE SHIFT
Sprout’s brand had been built for a simpler company. As the product strategy expanded and the company set its sights on a new category, the old persona and tenets no longer described where it was headed. The 2025 refresh and Sprout’s first-ever brand campaign set a new direction. My role was to sure our new visual brand could grow and last. This included overseeing the visual strategy and direction could uphold brand and craft integrity, and identifying optimization opportunities for scaling across visual disciplines and brand expression.
A refresh only takes hold once people start using it. As creative lead partner to the brand marketing, social, content, and comms teams, I led the brand design roadmap that turned the refreshed brand into tools and systems used across the org.
SHOWN BELOW: GLOBAL BRAND PRESENTATION TEMPLATE
BUILDING FOR WHAT’S NEXT
As Sprout moved to a multi-product strategy, a practical question came about: what happens to a company’s brand when Sprout acquires it?
To answer it, we developed a brand architecture model built around category platform, solutions and products. That became the north star for a more formalized brand design roadmap I developed and owned. That roadmap planned the work to sharpen Sprout’s visual foundations from photography direction and typography to color intention and motion principles, along with a playbook for bringing acquired brands into the system as Sprout kept growing.
HOLDING THE BAR AT SCALE
More work across more teams meant a quick social post and a flagship campaign could easily end up judged by the same bar. While there were practices in place for quality review, new brand assets and guidelines still left a lot of room for interpretation during adoption and first applications.
I led the evolution of a creative ambition framework that turned a quality check into a calibration of creative investment and business impact. This framework showed up at the start and end of every project to give creative leaders a defensible way to say no to over-scoping and invest more where it counted.
It also sharpened our quarterly portfolio reviews where we assessed brand alignment, which was critical with the adoption of new guidelines and brand architecture model.
Within 6 months of rolling out the evolved framework and portfolio review process, 97.5% of work was scoped at the right ambition level.
CREATIVE COLLABORATORS:
Brand strategy: Lizz Kannenberg
Brand design & art direction: Katie Powell, Susan Densa
Brand voice and story: Michelle Grano