SketchUp

Context

Evolve SketchUp’s brand for a new era, updating its legacy positioning into a more desirable, premium, and professional one with greater appeal to AEC professionals.

Strategy

Elevate the brand to connect with ambitions bigger than work, instill passion in users, and implement a vision for a future we can all share—in the AEC industry and beyond.

Solution

Implement a new positioning, voice, and visual identity that humanizes the brand, helps shape its products, and empowers people to harness SketchUp’s full potential.

Creative Context

SketchUp is a beloved brand whose founding promise no longer matched its capabilities. We built a new identity to modernize the brand without alienating SketchUp’s longtime user base.

Together with Trimble’s M+A, SketchUp is evolving to meet the needs of serious AEC professionals—without losing long-tail users. SketchUp desired to be taken more seriously and graduate from its legacy affiliation with Google and its “3D for everyone” positioning. Our brand strategy reflects this evolving ecosystem and empathizes with users’ diverse needs to retain credibility.

In addition to perception challenges, outmoded communication prevented active users from getting the most value. Our partnership focused on bringing clarity to SketchUp’s vast capabilities, highlighted a product experience that’s more intuitive and creative than the competition, and emphasized SketchUp's superpower: helping people communicate and develop their ideas.

SketchUp user portrait with text To Realize Their Vision

Brand Positioning

To suit evolving industry workflows, we positioned SketchUp as a premium platform and powerful tool for serious AEC professionals.

SketchUp was a pioneer in democratizing 3D modeling, but had outgrown its legacy positioning. Our newly optimized identity system champions better ways of working, captures the spirit of a product people love, and supercharges brand creativity and communication.

Collaborating with the SketchUp team, we transformed a product-first approach into an inspiring and actionable framework that allows SketchUp to authentically own its new ambitions. We articulated a singular vision which acts as both a unifying rallying cry and a future-facing north star to align and integrate the efforts of the product, engineering, and marketing teams.

Brand Guidelines

A newly optimized design system gives SketchUp the tools to be clear, creative, and consistent across touchpoints.

Using the foundational elements from SketchUp’s parent company Trimble, we created a more flexible system that leverages the design language of the product itself. Now, the visual identity is additive to users’ software experience, including UI-derived details, dynamic typography, and a refreshed color palette. The expanded toolbox empowers SketchUp staff to be more creative and efficient with clearly documented guidelines—a first in the company’s history—in order to quickly build advertising, social content, imagery, and video for all of its platforms.

Motion Toolkit

Innovative custom-coded animation templates make more possible.

SketchUp teams use their always-on channels to create daily content. Early in our collaboration, we identified a need for a unique motion toolkit that would enable them to animate completely within Adobe Premiere editing software without using After Effects.

In order to seamlessly integrate the new toolkit into SketchUp’s post-production workflow, we coded MOGRTs (motion graphics templates) that allow their editors to spend more time on storytelling and less on time-consuming animation. The new motion toolkits extend the brand’s identity into 3D space similar to the SketchUp software, and even allow for easy integration of images and objects from SketchUp’s proprietary 3D Warehouse library.

Services

Brand Strategy –– Design Strategy –– Visual Identity –– Animation –– Graphic Design –– Editing –– Post-Production –– Brand Guidelines –– Motion Guidelines –– Toolkits –– Animation Toolkits