Upwork Brand Identity Refresh

In 2023, Upwork came out with our a massive brand campaign and repositioning focused on changing the future of work.

As our campaign attracted new audiences, we realized there was a disconnect between the way the Upwork brand was showing up in communications vs. the user experience design on the platform.

In partnership with NOT W+K, our team set out to develop a design system that could do three things: 1. create consistency between the platform and our outbound marketing 2. stand out in the talent marketplace category which was getting much bigger with AI advancements and 3. have the flexibility to change as quickly as the product teams were innovating and releasing new features.

Through an exhaustive process, we changed key elements of the brand’s design system, from changing our primary color to black to introducing a secondary glimmer element that could catch attention in marketing materials. Beyond that we developed an underlying grid system for structure, which helped with UX design application. Then, we created more modularity to type and art direction so that there was flexibility across platform and outbound marketing to communicate different products, different solutions, and speak to different need states for our varied audiences.