Moneythink
Graphic Designer | Nov 2021 – Mar 2023
I working remotely to brainstorm, plan, design, and produce creative campaigns and promotional work for both the Moneythink and DecidED brands. This included website design, PDF handouts, printed materials, slide presentations, infographics, and social media ads.
Less Debt.
More Degrees.
Two Different Brands Same Mission
When I first started at Moneythink my first project was revamping the Moneythink and DecidED brands. Moneythink is the parent non-profit organization and DecidED is its free tool for students and advisors. Each has its own visual style, voice, and audience.
First, I cleaned up the Moneythink brand by reducing the colors and creating uniform icons and assets. Funders want to feel confident about where their money is going so I focused on showing clear information about our data and achievements.
Similarly, with DecidED, I reduced the colors from 12 to 3 and focused on showing clean and clear information. I challenged the idea that in order to appeal to young people you need crowded flashy “fun” graphics when in reality our students are looking for reliable information. DecidED’s mission is to give our students clear information about college costs, naturally the branding should reflect this.
After creating new graphic elements, I made two brand guidelines and developed separate asset libraries. This meant not only touching up the logo’s and redesigning assets but also, choosing new photography, designing icons, creating a separate branding guide website, and creating the rules on how everything should fit together.
Moneythink
DecidED
Social Media
While at Moneythink I organized, wrote, designed, planned, and scheduled social media posts using Google Docs, Canva, and Hootsuite. In Canva, I not only designed every social media post, story, and ad, but I also created and organized the asset library for each brand so that others could use my templates and make social media posts if needed. Additionally, I designed and managed the Linktree for both Moneythink and DecidED and trained Moneythink interns on marketing and social media creation.
After hiring a Marketing Director, I worked with them to create and test various social media ads. These would be either still or video formats for regular posts, stories, or TikTok-specific ads.
Websites
I helped work on a number of websites during my time at Moneythink. One of those projects was completely redesigning DecidED’s website. I was given a site map and most of the written content to start. I created each page in Figma and once my designs got approval for our Product VP, they were sent to our Developer. The Developer and I would make revisions as needed until the pages were approved to go live.
The first page I worked on was our Student Guides page, where I took a content card approach to organize the articles. The articles were organized into categories, which I represented with small “flags” and icons for each. I designed each article page for the Student Guides in Figma and then built each page myself in Wordpress.
Another website I helped design was a branding site made through Google Sites. It was meant to be internal and external facing. Anyone could go to this site and get useful information on how to use and display our brand for both Moneythink and DecidED.
Not only does it have useful branding information like color hex codes and downloadable fonts and images. It also has a collateral page that people could go to for easy navigation to our most used collateral.
DecidED Website
Moneythink Brand Site
Marketing Collateral
I was in charge of designing all collateral across the whole organization. I would help brainstorm with different departments, then design and produce high-quality creative campaigns and promotional work. These included things like print marketing materials (everything from print brochures to pricing tables or one-pagers), template Google Slide decks, webinar presentations, and much more.
So Much More
Branding, social media, websites, and collateral were just the beginning. I also…
Produced high-fidelity mockups in both still and video formats that could be used as demos and as handoffs to engineering
Participated in an optional DEI workgroup that would help audit the DEI initiative org-wide
Plan, organize, and manage large time-sensitive projects and provide regular project status updates through Asana and Slack
Designed all conference collateral from brochures and table cloths to business cards and t-shirts
Worked within HubSpot and Mailchimp to create branded email templates
Helped our UX Designer with interface design for the DecidED web app
