At Citrix I was in control of the design of marketing assets for our IT audience. This is a group that appreciates a bit less pandering or “gimick-y” marketing tactics, and to that end I made it a goal to show the professionals who would read our materials the respect they’re due while also being mindful of:
Where the asset lives in the funnel.
Assets higher in the funnel need to be more broad in their concepts and a bit more surface-level in explanations before the deeper dives further down in the funnel. This is true even for a technical audience like IT professionals!Not letting the designs be dry and boring.
Just because an audience is more serious or technical doesn’t mean that the designs can’t be fun and light-hearted (especially in top-of-funnel assets) - just that it needs to be done in a tactful way.
One of the most versatile ways I tried to achieve that goal was by re-designing the guidelines for our technical graphics. Often times these are done by subject matter experts who are not designers, and I wanted us to be able to quickly take their graphics and update them to be more legible, easily digested, and in-line with Citrix’s branding, look, and feel. You can see examples of these graphics in several of the below pieces.
Change Agent E-book
Supercharge Your Digital Workspace E-book
For this e-book I was challenged to find a way to visually represent the benefits of Citrix SD-Wan. I decided to use the idea of physical traffic representing network traffic when creating the graphic used on pages 6-9. This piece and many others I worked closely with subject matter experts to ensure that my graphics were accurate and well-represented the information it was meant to convey.
Secure Access / Secure Analytics Whitepapers
These are a couple of sample pages from assets near the bottom of the funnel. They’re more information-heavy and have transitioned from a more fun, illustrative style, to the meat-and-potatoes of text and technical diagrams. But with a pleasing hierarchy and consistent typography, along with some pops of color, they’re easy on the eye and invite the reader in and avoid overwhelming them with giant blocks of text and confusing diagrams.
Infographics
Infographics were where I could get as fun and creative as I wanted! I loved taking the basic illustration styles in the Citrix brand and seeing how I could tell stories with them and come up with new graphics of my own that blended in seamlessly. Here are just a couple of examples of the kinds of infographics we produced regularly. See the Secure Digital Workspace project in my main portfolio for an example of the interactive inforgraphics we would also produce.
