Brand Identity · Visual Systems · Illustrations
Skills For Scale
Two strong brands in the same frame. The design had to make room for both.
Role
Art Direction & Designer
Client
Cornerstone OnDemand
Recognition
Overview
Masters of Scale is Reid Hoffman's podcast on what it takes to build something that lasts. Cornerstone is a global enterprise learning platform. Skills for Scale was the answer to a specific question: what does it look like when those two things become one?
Not a co-branded series where two logos sit next to each other. A new brand, built from scratch, designed to house Masters of Scale content within the Cornerstone ecosystem without either identity losing what made it recognizable.
Approach
The wrong move was to split the difference: take a little from each brand and produce something generic that neither side recognized. That's the easy version and it doesn't work.
Instead we built something new. A complete brand system with its own identity. Deep blue as the primary environment, orange as the accent, a custom illustration style using outlined icons that made abstract business concepts immediate and tangible. If the content was about television, you showed a television. Direct, grounded, unambiguous.
The co-branding rules, color logic, typography system, photo treatment, layout templates, illustration guidelines — all of it documented in a full brand standards system built to govern every execution that came out of the production.
My contribution was in the variations and the executions. Concepting alongside the art director, expanding the range of the system, testing different directions until the right ones emerged. That's how brand systems actually get built: not in one decisive moment but through iteration, elimination, and the willingness to keep pushing until something is genuinely right.
Challenge
The content dealt with ideas that are genuinely hard to visualize. Scaling a company. Building from first principles. Making decisions under uncertainty. Abstract concepts from founders and CEOs that don't have obvious visual forms.
At the same time both brands had equity worth protecting. The system had to feel like Masters of Scale and like Cornerstone, while being neither. That's a narrow target and it moves depending on the content.
Outcome
A complete brand system — logo lockups, co-branding rules, color palette, typography, illustration style, photo treatment, pattern graphics, layout templates — built to govern a full production and documented clearly enough that any designer could pick it up and work within it.
The result was a visual identity neither brand could have produced alone. Something that belonged to both without being owned by either.
Silver Telly Award — Non-Broadcast Business Learning
