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In the last year, this team processed 856,648,859 words across 100,000+ articles in 50 Languages. That’s a lot. I had the opportunity to build an internal brand for the Cisco International Experience (IX) team, which handles all localization projects for the company. They wanted a stronger presence to showcase their capabilities, processes, and how they streamline localization for all of Cisco’s products. This brand project aimed to give the team ownership and swagger, and to highlight their impressive stats and skills. How, you ask? We built dozens of case studies, educational content, and project examples on a SharePoint website to share company-wide. Think of it as a team brand awareness launch within Cisco.
In my best Austin Powers’ voice: “Let’s get international, baby!” I mean, that’s the core of the team, ain’t it? Localization is an interesting industry, especially from a design perspective. I’ve worked on projects that required localization, and you get really up to speed on your UI & layout skills. You build for scale, you build for space. A paragraph in English may translate to twice its character size in German, or how do fonts react in Traditional Chinese– hint, most times those fonts do not react as expected.
I digress, back on point, International.
We wanted to showcase the team’s international focus. The talk balloon is a universal symbol of communication, and merged with the globe, it seems a no-brainer. I really enjoy the simplicity of how this turned out.
There were some design constraints to this design project. Being on the in-house side of brand teams. The subject of logos for internal teams can be a sore point for brand consistency. So, staying true to the core brand guidelines, we decided to make a clean & simple icon to lock up with the logo. We mimicked some of the existing icons and kept the line style and colors the same. It reminds me of the old Pan-Am brand, international travel, and mid-century modern aesthetics.
I’ll admit. SharePoint wasn’t my strong suit. Heck, Windows and Microsoft products aren’t my go-tos for design. However, with limitations comes inspiration–and that inspiration is solving the problem of how to market this team within the larger company.
Therefore, what makes a good marketing site in an intranet setting? What site-wide content can make a business case? Case studies are a great content plan. We built dozens of case studies for this project that demonstrate the team’s capabilities, and showcasing them across the site is a great way for Cisco employees to learn. Whether it’s people new to the world of localization, or a new product manager launching a new product, who doesn’t know how the Cisco IX team can smoothly assist with the localization of their new hardware. Maybe they don’t even know what Localization is? That’s the point of this project and the site.
Speaking of case studies, we created well-designed content in a variety of formats: Presentations, downloadable PDFs, and landing pages. Clean, informative layouts to showcase KPIs, capabilities, and examples, just like a good customer-facing case study should.
This was a fun project to solve the awareness needs of the Cisco IX team. An informative site to showcase the vital talents of the team within Cisco.
If you like what you see here and need help with your next creative marketing project. Please reach out or hit me up on Calendly to set up a call.
Creative can be a circus. Let us help.
Cheers
Greg
Idea Circus 💡 🎪
Not “Influencer” social,.. but social enough.
How do you elevate a company’s brand? Well, you call me, of course 😉
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