Customer Highlights
Clear branding for customer stories
SEL distinguishes itself within its industry through high-quality products, exceptional customer service, and comprehensive engineering expertise. To support this positioning, I designed a modular customer story template that could flex within the CMS while maintaining a consistent, recognizable structure across the series.
THE CHALLENGE
The startup lacked a defined visual identity and struggled to communicate its value clearly. Early users found the product interesting but were confused about its positioning.
The site needed to balance storytelling with clarity while remaining flexible enough to evolve alongside the product and company vision.
APPROACH
Establishing a clear, repeatable framework was essential. I partnered with the writing team to define a standardized narrative outline that could adapt to different stories while preserving consistency. In parallel, I accounted for a wide range of media and visual requirements, including video, animated and SVG diagrams, image galleries, lead-generation form callouts, and pull quotes.
To visually differentiate customer stories from other core content—such as newsroom articles—I leaned into a serif typeface within our brand system that had not previously been used on the site, giving the stories a more editorial, premium feel.
The template was designed to scale seamlessly across breakpoints, ensuring a consistent experience for users coming from digital and social campaigns as well as those browsing on desktop. When a story draft is delivered, I cross-reference it with the photography and video selects from the on-site shoot. From there, I identify moments where visuals can break up longer sections of copy and reinforce key moments in the narrative, balancing those elements with strategically placed pull quotes.
For supporting SEO and to draw attention to featured offerings, I introduced a “Components Mentioned” section with quick links to relevant products and services. At the end of each story, related-story cards guide users to additional content tied to similar products or services. The hero banner was designed to support both high-impact still photography and looping MP4 video, allowing flexibility based on available media.
REFLECTION
After publication, the opportunity for inconsistency or error increases. The customer story template is built using our modular “page builder” CMS content type, which offers significant flexibility and supports a wide range of use cases across the site. However, that flexibility can also introduce challenges. Once handed off, content owners may request additions that don’t align with the original design intent or create inconsistencies across the series.
In many cases, small updates are managed by a web coordinator who may not have the background context needed to identify when a request should be pushed back or handled differently. Through this process, I learned the importance of clear documentation for adaptable templates—ensuring that as the system evolves, the design integrity of the customer stories remains intact over time.