Since January, I’ve been working as a design generalist for RocketReach, a SaaS company that helps you prospect leads for marketing, sales, and recruiting. In the relatively short time we’ve worked together, I’ve come to love their product and their approach to gathering data. It’s been a process of overhauling many aspects of the product and the marketing, from the homepage to the way search results are displayed in the web app itself.

A Brand Refresh

Despite having a pretty kick-ass logo, RocketReach’s homepage and overall brand identity was a little dated and could do with a refresh. So, with the guidance of Amit from RocketReach, I designed a new brand identity that centered around fun, vibrant space-themed icons and portraits on splashy blue gradients. We put an emphasis on people, both in photography and in illustrations. I also took care to design a solution to the pesky fold issue that affected the old RocketReach homepage: in the user testing I conducted, more than a few users didn’t know that the homepage was scrollable.

Because our work centers so much on people, Amit and I agreed it was important to depict people prominently in the marketing.

The new homepage features an active animation that cycles through a few contacts that appear on a search bar. Special attention was taken to ensure that the animation was smooth, twangy, and a pleasure to watch. We also had to make a special cut-down mobile version that displays the same contacts in a different form factor (for easy loading). I had the pleasure of learning how to use the bodymovin After Effects script to export animated svgs that could be loaded onto the site itself.

The new homepage also includes these new feature animations I executed in After Effects. They were rendered out using bodymovin for smooth playback in html.

Further down on the page, under the customer logos, I pushed for the inclusion of Customer Testimonials, which allow us to display the feedback our customers gave us, as well as showcase some photos of those customers (further reinforcing the human-based nature of our product).

Conclusion (for now)

All in all, It’s been a real pleasure watching the guys at RocketReach bring this project to life. Special thanks to Chris and his absolutely wizard-tier skills.