Stories, updates and ideas from Jellypepper

Blog

Asking for personal data is a delicate process and it can be very difficult to know how much information you need. For example, if you are asking for someone’s email address on your product onboarding page, do you ask them to input their email address right then? Or should they add in their email later after they have learned more about the product? What if they don’t want to give out an email at all? This article will help answer these questions by providing tips to create perfect onboarding copy.

Understand your audience's priorities and goals

Understanding your audience, their needs and goals is crucial to providing onboarding that will help them achieve those things. Determine what they are trying to do with your product or service in order for you to tailor copy appropriately. Provide a few options of different actions so they can find something which suits them best.

"Which option appeals more? (a) I want this done quickly; (b) I am up for an adventure."

You can organise the information in bullet points if that's easier. You may also want to make a list of sub-points under each section so it will be easier to edit them later.

For example, you may want to start thinking about questions such as:

Which types of requests are a bad idea at certain stage in that relationship?

What kind of content might work better than other types depending on the level of trust established between them and your company so far?

How does UX play into this balancing act as well, since it allows an opportunity for you to connect with your users on an emotional level.

When should you ask for personal information from users during the onboarding process, and what type of user data would be appropriate to request at different stages in their relationship with your company (low vs. high friction)?

When asking people to input information about themselves during onboarding, it's best to start with low-friction questions, such as:

If the user has given you low-friction information, it's time for some higher friction. Questions that might be considered high-friction would include things like:

After each step, ask yourself if there are any more steps available which could lead them closer to committing their trust. If not, then go ahead and finish onboarding by asking for something they can commit on behalf of themselves - such as payment details.

The way you speak to your users is just as important to your brand as your logo, colours or fonts. Figuring out whether you're witty, casual, excited or serious can have a massive impact on how your users perceive you and whether they're willing to part with their personal information.

It's tempting to use the same "sign up" language in every onboarding email, but it ends up coming off as robotic and impersonal. Experiment with different ways of getting users excited about using your product - you'll be pleasantly surprised by how many people respond well! And don't forget humour: a little lighthearted banter never hurts. It shows that there are real humans behind this experience who care enough make sure they're providing value for their customers.

One of the most common mistakes in creating an onboarding process is asking users too many questions on one screen. Remember, onboarding is about easing your user into the product. Group your questions by level of friction and try to limit yourself to a maximum of five questions per screen.

Your goal should be crafting an onboarding experience that will delight users - not scare them off by bombarding them with questions or overwhelming language. That means taking the time to write out meaningful copy that makes sense in context instead of relying on stock phrases like "Sign up now." Keep it personal! Read back over your content and ask yourself: are we being too sales-y? Are we asking for too much information? Is the copy too complicated? Would a regular user understand what this means?

Be sure to use language that is clear and concise. Be specific about the problem your product solves, but don't forget to offer some general benefits too! Remember: not all users are on the same page when it comes to understanding what they need from your app or service. You want them engaged with your copy - not frustrated. Make room in their onboarding experience for discovery!

In order to make sure that people are onboarding in the right way, use a push strategy for some and a pull strategy for others.

Push copy is about urging your user towards action while making it easy as possible to do so - this might include nudges from emails or popups on their homepage reminding them of the value they'll get if they sign up now. Make sure you're not being too nagging! That's how we lose users.

Pull copy is more personal: ask open-ended questions like what drives them crazy at work? What are their goals long term? This type of copy needs time investment (more than pushing), but it can yield much better results for your product in the long-term. Balance these two strategies to keep your user onboarding for the long-term. Remember, good things take time!

Without a strong UX foundation that allows them to trust you and feel safe with opening up more personal information, they'll never get past those first few screens of setting up an account or signing in - no matter how compelling your copy is on its own. This is why we need usability testing: because if our product's not intuitive enough, even the best copy won't be able to save it.

Think about whether you're pushing too hard or pulling too little: are people onboarded as quickly as possible? Are they adequately engaged before being pushed towards higher friction interactions like filling out their profile? How can you balance the information you need with the experience they're having?

Asking for personal data is a delicate process, so we've compiled some tips on how to best ask users for their personal information.

Tips for writing perfect product onboarding copy

For the past few months, we've been slowly working on the Jellypepper brand and website. We released the new site and brand a few weeks ago (hope you like it ✌️), but before this year, we've never actually invested any time into the Jellypepper brand.

It was essentially hacked together over the last few years with the content we had available and the small time between each new project where we could write a few words, update some typos or create some new pages. We spent whatever spare time we had publishing case studies.

A big contributor to the new design and language was Brand Strategy — figuring out who we really are, what we do and where we're going. If we're going to be an agency that offers branding services, it's pretty critical that our own brand be reflective of our personality and culture.

So, I wanted to show some of the discussions and thoughts we had internally that led to our new brand — maybe it'll inspire you to think more about your own brand and how to turn culture into design.

Our industry is incredibly busy — there's a new agency popping up every day. Our old website was designed to stand out and compete almost purely from our core message — a creative agency for disrupters. Our focus on "disruptive startups" (startups that are working on cool technology, or in a cool industry) is what drew people in.

Every tech startup wants to be seen as disruptive, so in a sense it appeals to their ego. But beyond that, our existing and previous clients also creates a sense of rapport through a shared understanding that we know the struggles that they're going through and we have the tools to help them get from, as Peter Thiel says, zero to one.

This is all well and good — we absolutely love working with disruptive tech startups — but it's unfair to the folks we want to work with who don't see themselves as disruptive, folks who are focused on things like social good or community-driven initiatives.

We wanted our new brand direction to take a step back from this disruptive-first attitude and focus more on the vibrant and interesting ideas people have on a daily basis. This new direction would also form the basis for a new brand identity, as well as the guidelines for copywriting throughout the new site and beyond.

We had a lot of goals for the new brand direction, a key one being a sense of coherency and quality throughout our own brand. We put a lot of effort into our client work and case studies and we wanted to bring that same level of care into our own.

As a creative director, it also helps from an internal alignment perspective, bringing the team onto the same page in terms of how to represent Jellypepper, not just from a visual perspective but in how we talk to clients, publish work, etc.

Externally, we wanted to convey the long-term benefit of partnering with Jellypepper for whatever you need help with. Jellypepper's client list has begun to look a lot like a VC portfolio. In the same way that raising money from certain venture capital firms signals you are destined for success, we'd love for that little "Website designed by Jellypepper" in the footer to mean you've been set up for success.

But at the end of the day, we just wanted our identity and language to resonate more with the people we love working with — past and future clients who share our values and vision for a future that's a bit... brighter.

To structure this massive undertaking, we had to treat ourselves like a client. We started by running an extensive Brand Strategy project on ourselves — setting our goals in stone, having conversations with our internal team and with clients, performing desk research on the wider industry and researching our target audience.

One of the most insightful aspects of this process involved aligning the way we think about ourselves with the way we're perceived by our past clients. We reached out to a few of our past clients — Lightswap and Corellium — to see if we could find dissonance between their perceptions of us before and after we started working together.

Eventually, we figured out two key things:

Agency practices are regularly stifling and impersonal. 70% of small business owners rate their agency experience ≤ 3 stars, while 45% have negative perceptions towards agencies in general. Clients feel uncomfortable when agencies take themselves too seriously and are not willing to collaborate — they're seen as a short term necessary evil rather than long-term creative partner. Working with agencies should be fun and engaging, as long as they have a genuine interest and understanding of what their clients do. Thankfully, according to our clients, our progressive and stimulating approach is a refreshing example of this.

Small companies and startups have no room for error — budget and timeline wise. Agencies have to be chosen carefully and essentially adopted as new team members, therefore the agency's reputation and cultural fit are extremely important factors. Lean business models like ours are gaining traction — the remote model leading to smaller overheads — and the mindset encourages efficiency. Essentially, we need to play to our strengths and focus on how efficient and reliable our unique business model is.

More than 80% of agencies we explored take themselves seriously with an understated and formal vibe — highly aspirational and frequently serious. From our discussions, it's exactly what can make clients feel intimidated and why we decided to double-down on our expressing our enthusiasm, integrity and problem-solving attitude in our new brand.

More importantly, we wanted to surface some of our core values:

One of the things we value is show, not talk — we rely less on sales decks, phone calls and meetings. Instead we focus on evolving our own brand and publishing amazing case studies and blog content that shows that we know what we're talking about. During a project, we prefer delivering value in iterations rather than communicating it will all be done eventually.

If you're truly good at something, you shouldn't have to convince everyone you meet.

Another is our greatest strength, which isn't our past work, client list or even our process. It’s our ability to jump into a completely new idea or industry, immerse ourselves in it, understand it as best we can, collaborate with the internal team and produce something that looks and feels naturally brilliant.

Our clients have noted that “we’re great at understanding new, complex ideas quickly” which is kind of a must for the diverse industries that we work. They're referring to the fact we can dive into concepts like blockchain, AI, self-driving cars, etc. and achieve a relatively good understanding of how it actually works under the hood in just a few days.

We hadn't talked openly about the team on our website historically because our business model is very different to how agencies typically operate — hiring a full-time creative team, having an office, etc. We're a remote and distributed studio, which historically made some clients uncomfortable.

But here's the thing — our startup clients don't mind this difference. In fact, due to COVID-19, this model has actually made us resilient to the downturns affecting traditional agency models. It means we have smaller overheads that we don't need to pass on to clients and it means we can work with the best talent anywhere, not limited to who can work 9—5 in a bleak office.

And frankly, the kind of leads that aren't comfortable with such a modern approach to work are not the sort of people we want to be working with.

We've done a lot in the way of services over the last few years — digital campaigns, 3D and motion design, SEO, growth and content marketing, print design. This rebrand was also a chance for us to revisit our services and decide what we want to focus on going forward, but more importantly, how to frame and explain what we do to our audience.

Out of the eight verticals we've previously engaged in, we decided to continue with three, but ensure we can execute them end-to-end and perfectly. Our new focus is simply: brands, websites and products.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this glimpse into our new brand strategy for Jellypepper!

Jellypepper does Jellypepper. How meta! A bit of background into our recent brand strategy and identity refresh.

Revisiting the Jellypepper brand in 2021

We first started offering marketing sites to clients in late 2017, pretty much when we started Jellypepper. At the time, the ecosystem around static site generators was not as developed as it is now and our team was only familiar with everyone’s favourite website framework — Wordpress.

We managed to build some pretty good websites with it, but the development experience was basically the worst thing ever. Hosting, maintenance and upgrades were an absolute nightmare and anything remotely complex was handled with a shoddy wordpress plugin.

Our clients weren’t super happy either — the opinionated Wordpress architecture and UI made componentising sites… not fun. About six months after starting, we decided we either needed to find a new approach or just stop developing websites altogether.

We tried a few other options: Squarespace (which runs on JSON-T), Shopify (liquid templates), Ghost (which at the time was pretty much only good for blog posts) or building everything from scratch (nope).

Eventually we landed on this concept called the JAMStack — super early days but it used the same language as our apps (React). From an agency perspective, this means that instead of hiring one developer that’s decent in JS and another that’s decent in Rails / PHP / whatever, we could stick to working with absolute units of Javascript.

There were a handful of other things that attracted us to the JAMStack and static-site generators in particular so, thought I might share these with you. It’s sort of what this whole ramble is about. If you’re freelancing or running an agency, these might help when you pitch your client.

The first thing we really liked obviously is the dev environment. Once I clone a new repo, I can just run npm i and npm start and it’s running in a couple of minutes. This isn’t just a thing for our team — when we handover to clients they usually have one person on the team at least who’s familiar with JS / NPM. They don’t even have to run it though, they can just plug it into Netlify or Vercel and it builds and deploys automatically.

Plus, not having to boot up LAMP / XAMPP / MAMP / CRAMP is just fantastic.

A really great one is the ability to go from creating a GitHub repo to launching a staging site in two minutes. We have a yeoman generator for Gatsby and Next.js sites, meaning we can split the workload — I'll create the repo and provision the hosting while our developers run the generator, add the repo origin and push — and within 2 minutes, the boilerplate is live.

Plus, we can use that same link for QA testing permanently!

Another great feature for agency-client relationships is the decoupled stack. We typically use a headless CMS like Prismic, GraphCMS, Sanity or Contentful. Despite the obvious benefit that our boilerplate’s data layer is flexible, it means that we can scaffold all the schemas / content types upfront.

Then we give CMS access or ownership to the client to add all their copy and content in while we build out the UI. They can see it come to life with their own fingertips.. and we don't have to copy and paste their Microsoft word docs into the CMS for them.

This one’s pretty straightforward — because of the way our JAMStack sites are architected with hot reloading and the fact it uses React at it’s core for templating, we’re able to do the same amount of work in about half the time. This means that if we’re going up against other agencies, we’ll win out on speed and profit margin almost every time.

One feature that’s been helpful for us quite a bit recently is the ability to have multiple content sources easily. We had one client recently with over 300 blog posts in Wordpress and was in a rush to get a new site out. We were able to add Wordpress as a content source and abstract the templating in a way that allowed us to ship that for Release 1, then come back around and migrate all the Wordpress posts to Prismic later on.

This comes in super handy for a typical site for us which uses Wordpress for old blog posts, Prismic for the new content, Workable or Lever for the jobs board and Instagram for the About page. Otherwise we’d have to write API scripts for each of these manually.

This is actually a really interesting one — we have clients occasionally who have a really great engineering team and have built their entire design system in React + Storybook. Rather than replicate all their work, we can just add their design system as a dependency in our project and start using them straight away.

A really important one is the community around JAMStack. Gatsby, for example, has such a rich ecosystem of content-site specific plugins, sources and transformers. Next by itself is super powerful, but people have written amazing plugins that handle PWAs and SEO.

This means we can set up a boilerplate that generates progressive, lightweight sites rich with plugins for generating robots, sitemaps and manifests; and comes with Preact, Helmet, image transformers and compressors, polyfills, offline support and more. Out of the box, a brand new site comes with 100% PWA compatibility and 100/100 for all Lighthouse scores.

We can start performance optimisation at 90%, shifting our focus to SEO and best practices. Performance optimisation is a huge reason to use the JAMStack — Next and Gatsby are unrivalled for both static rendering performance and SPA hydrating. I could spew out a bunch of stats around how important performance is, but the summary is that this is ridiculously good for us and our clients — it means they can provide an experience faster than their competitor’s sites and higher conversion rates.

Anyway, hopefully you’ve got some idea of why the JAMStack is super useful for agencies. It’s the foundation of every great website we build. We have some more information on the JAMStack if you're curious and we occasionally run a similar talk with clients to convince them of going with Gatsby or Next.

So you know... I’ll send you an invoice.

A talk from the Gatsby Arvos meetup about Gatsby and Next.js and why we decided to use them at Jellypepper.

Why we moved from Wordpress to JAMStack

Starting a startup is hard enough without having to pay full-price for the fundamental resources to run your business. Over the years, we've scoured the internet for startup plans for our clients and our own projects. Here are our 10 favourites we use every time.

Stripe Atlas is a powerful, safe, and easy-to-use platform for forming a company. By removing lengthy paperwork, legal complexity, and numerous fees, Stripe Atlas helps you launch your startup from anywhere in the world.

While Stripe itself has a generous pricing method of 1.75% (or 2.9% for international cards) + $0.30 per transaction, their Atlas toolkit is a fantastic way of kickstarting your company with a U.S. legal entity, stock issued to founders, special offers on other services and free credits for the Stripe payments platform!

The leading Customer Data Platform. Segment collects user events from your web & mobile apps and provides a complete data toolkit to every team in your company.

Segment is an absolutely brilliant tool for SaaS products as you'll eventually want to wire up your entire app to talk to your CRM, social media tools, newsletter, database and more. Their Startup program gives you up to two years free usage ($25k in credits) and $1M in free software with their partners.

The Top Analytics Choice for Digital Teams. Amplitude is a product analytics tool aimed at getting your users to that "aha" moment when they realize they can’t live without your service.

Amplitude's startup scholarship gives you a year of Amplitude for free, which works out at roughly $40k. You can combine this with the Segment startup program above to kickstart your product with all the behavioural analytics you'll ever need, for free.

Sentry's application monitoring platform helps every developer diagnose, fix, and optimize the performance of their code. They help software teams build better software, faster.

While Sentry don't have a startup plan, their developer plan is completely free and has support for all languages, release tracking and is fairly generous with metrics — 5K tracked errors, 10K transactions and 1GB attachments.

SendGrid is an email provider, helping you with reliable email delivery at scale. Their SMTP service helps you confidently build and grow your email program.

SendGrid doesn't have a startup plan but their free tier is 100 emails a day forever, which compared to other email providers like Postmark or Mailgun is pretty good.

Mailgun actually has 5000 emails free for the first 3 months then PAYG, which is another solid option if you have a shorter projected time to revenue.

Canny helps you build better products with customer feedback. Capture, organize, and analyze feedback in one place to inform your product decisions.

While Canny is relatively expensive, starting at $50/month, they offer special plans for healthcare, non-profit, and education companies. They also have discounts for early‑stage and consumer / B2C companies, which we've personally used before.

Firebase helps you build and run successful apps. Backed by Google and loved by app development teams - from startups to global enterprises.

We've used Firebase on almost every single app we've built — it's a brilliant backend-as-a-service with database infrastructure, authentication, cloud functions and more built in.

While they don't have a startup plan, their PAYG plan (called Blaze) is unbelievably generous, meaning our early-stage apps end up costing mere cents per month to run.

Airwallex is a business account, built for the modern business. They take the hassle out of growing your business internationally.

Airwallex are an awesome new addition to our list, offering multi-currency business accounts, virtual debit cards, Xero integration and more. They have no monthly account fees and no card fees — just a small margin on interbank FX rates — which means it grows as your company does.

Notion is an all-in-one workspace. One tool for your whole team to write, plan and get organized.

At Jellypepper, Notion is our second most-used product (after Slack obvs). They have an amazing startup plan that offers $1000 in credit towards their Team Plan, which is also generously priced.

Typeform give you a better way to ask. You don't want to make a boring form and your audience won't answer one. Create a typeform instead—and make everyone happy.

Typeform have a great startup plan where, if you meet the criteria (seed stage, < $1m funding, $1m lifetime revenue and a new customer), you can get 50% of any plan for 6 months. We've used Typeform for many products to collect valuable user feedback and crowdsource knowledge quickly.

Some cost-effective tools and methods of getting your SaaS product off the ground without breaking the bank.

Our top 10 resources for launching a new startup

While building web apps is easy, building performant web apps can be difficult. All the integrations, marketing tools, analytic embeds and interactive Javascript nowadays can cause your page to slow down more than you realise.

When we build a web app, we continually test its performance systematically and objectively against the industry standard auditing tool — Google Lighthouse (available in Chrome’s inspector).

These audits measure a range of factors by loading a page and throttling down resources to compute a score out of 100. A 100/100 score represents best-in-class performance and is incredibly difficult to achieve, but a goal we aim for with all our projects.

Here's a few things we consider when addressing performance...

One of the first things a user notices in how long an app takes to load. There are two parts to this: time to first render and time to interactive (TTI). The biggest factors impacting first render and TTI is:

the amount of code (particularly JavaScript) that the browser has to download, parse, and execute; and

the number of render-blocking processes that have to complete before a page loads.

If your web app is relatively simply and doesn’t need to optimise heavy animations or interactions during runtime, you can aggressively optimise initial payloads instead by using Preact in place of React, which will gives a massive reduction (up to 97% last time we checked) in JavaScript weight.

You can also follow an "app shell" model for UIs, prioritising the render of your basic layout before loading in components, will improve first render and users’ perception of performance. You can pair this idea with animated grey blocks, also called a Skeleton state.

You can also set up code splitting by route to further reduce code weight, only loading the code required for any one page when it is viewed. Additionally, you can lazy-load heavy assets like web fonts, swapping them in once a page has loaded, rather than blocking render.

The overall goal is to avoid reliance on heavy JavaScript libraries wherever possible.

Wherever possible, you should aim to leverage the web platform for a given feature. This will both allow you to reduce code weight and have native-like performance under the hood.

Using new web standards, and polyfilling for legacy browsers (CSS Variables, CSS Grid, etc) Balancing developer productivity with web standard, by avoiding patterns like CSS-in-JS that are nice for developers but negatively impact performance

New browser APIs allow you to prepare your app as a Progressive Web App that is offline-capable, installable on mobile devices, and highly performant. You can build service workers (or more likely, use a plugin like next-pwa) to intelligently cache content and harden your app against patchy network connectivity.

Additionally, you can look into prefetching, preloading, and preconnecting to critical resources, as well as setting up a solid manifest to make your web app installable on mobile devices.

If you choose to develop a decoupled web app (a static frontend that consumes an API), you can easily take advantage of blazing fast infrastructure. We use tools like Firebase a lot for this type of setup.

Hosting on the right platform can also help — choosing a host with a global static-file CDN like Netlify or Vercel can speed up content delivery. If you can manage it, serving all assets over HTTP/2 can allow for simultaneous connections that vastly improve network performance.

Lastly, consider aggressively cache long-term static assets and using HTTP/2 Push to preemptively serve critical resources, before your app even requests them.

Performance is a central focus of any project we take on, due to its huge impact on user experience and engagement.

How we build web apps with class-leading performance

This is a guest post from our friends at Surge.

Brand new concepts means you probably won’t see traction in two of the most important channels for acquiring new customers: Organic and Paid search. Let's take a "mobile barber service" for example. If we check out the monthly search volume in the U.S., we can see there's 4000+ searches monthly for the top 18 keywords.

So the lesson here is, make sure it really is super niche first by doing research, you can use Google’s free keyword planner tool to work out if anyone is searching for your solution.

Regardless, you've got a small handful of options when starting off...

If there is a reasonable volume already (more than 1000 monthly), look at the cost per click, is this low enough to leave you with margin? Using the barber example above, let’s say per haircut you make $30 and the average cost per click is $1. What you’ll have to work out is, how many clicks does it take for you to gain a new customer?

Now don’t stop here, make sure a new customer can generate additional customers by creating a referral loop. This is the secret sauce to a lot of great growth strategy, you can use loyalty campaigns or incentivised referral campaigns.

Then look at the problem you’re solving, a problem statement for mobile barber would be something along the lines of “Too busy for haircuts.” or “Don’t like going to the barbers". The problem has to be universal, if no one is searching for the problem you’re trying to solve, then you’ve got to go back to the drawing board and figure out if you should be pursuing this business.

Bid for symptoms rather than solutions, I did a quick research on cybersecurity and it looks like the search volume is really low. Below is a snapshot of monthly search volume for cybersecurity.

Symptom means bidding for things such as “prevent ransomware”. You can also bid on competitor related terms where you think your product has a competitive advantage over.

This might be surprising, but events can be hosted at almost no cost. Given enough digging and asking, you can get a free sponsored venue and catering.

Not only will events bring awareness that your product exists. It also helps associate your brand with thought leadership when you invite topic experts as speakers. Meetups will often attract people from large enterprises, which can become potential leads.

Now that you have the exposure channel sorted. Let’s talk about education, education is all about value proposition, this is basically what the customer gets out of your product and how it solves their problems.

Most of the time, the customer just needs to know the pain and gain, you need to make sure you cover these two points, minimal pain, maximum gain, they don’t need to know exactly how it works (if it’s technical and boring).

If you don’t know how to articulate the value proposition or gain, you can talk to potential customers. Run a short 20 minute interview. Explain to them what your product is and ask them to:

Explain your product back in their words – this will help you craft education pieces or copywriting in language your customers understand

Explain the exact benefit they think they’ll gain from your product – validate this against your own assumptions, does it align with what you originally thought?

Some cost-effective methods and mediums for getting your bright idea off the ground.

How to educate and build brand awareness for new ideas

Some concepts and terms used in the creative industry can be difficult to grasp, especially when they’re a little less tangible than a logo. This tends to be the case with the important yet misunderstood role of brand strategy.

To understand what brand strategy is, let’s start with the basics. Brands exist for a very simple reason: to give companies an identity. They help outsiders get a feel of who’s behind a company name - and help insiders align on a core identity.

Building a brand means defining what the company looks like, how it behaves and how it talks. To figure all this out, we strategise.

When we talk about brand strategy, we essentially talk about building the framework on which all creative work relies on. Setting the right parameters means everything that follows is coherent and seamless. If you go straight into visuals and copy without that framework, things can get messy. Brands without a clear strategy can be spotted from miles away. Here’s how:

When a brand doesn’t successfully differentiate nor reflect the ethos of the company

When the designers can’t tell you why they made specific design decisions

When there’s lots of conflicting and inconsistent messaging

When a brand continuously needs to be refreshed or updated

Now let’s dive a little deeper into what the brand strategy process looks like. The first thing we do when creating or refreshing a brand is to listen. We gather all kinds of perspectives so we can get the whole picture. We talk to people within the company, but also with customers. We look into what competitors do, how the industry is evolving and what the overall context is. Once we’re swimming in information and knowledge, that’s when we start to simplify and define what the brand should be about. To do so, we ask ourselves questions like:

What's the company's overall vision and ambition?

What personality traits reflect the company's culture? Should we create a brand that's fun, serious, mysterious, caring, daring?

What audiences is the brand trying to reach?

How can we simply explain what the company does?

How should we structure and present the entire offering to the outside world in the clearest possible way?

What are the reasons to believe everything we claim is true?

Clarifying the above is critical for designers and copywriters to work their magic as it gives them a structure in which to be creative.

Beyond the creative process, a well-defined brand strategy can help with business decisions and team alignment as it provides a clear and unifying direction for the company.

To summarise, this thorough process aims to build brands that last by accurately reflecting what the company is about and where it’s going. Brand strategists don’t tend to come up with anything new but rather uncover truths that are buried in a sea of information, thoughts and opinions - and package them in a clear, sensible and compelling way.

Brand strategy can feel like an intangible and unclear concept. Here’s a brief overview of what it is and why it’s crucial to the creative process.

Brand Strategy: that thing you didn’t know you needed

At the end of every branding project, we deliver a brand book that consolidates everything we created - from the visuals and copy to the strategic thinking behind them. Find out why brand books are important, what's in them and what principles guide us at Jellypepper.

If a brand was an object, it'd be a brand book. In a nutshell, brand books package all the branding work into a beautiful, simple and helpful document. What's in there forms the foundation for every communication, on any touchpoint. Brand books make sure everyone is on the same page and enable coherence across everything a brand does or says. So they're pretty crucial.

The content varies from one brand to another but we typically structure them into three main categories:

We start by giving an overview of the company, why it exists, what makes it unique, what are its fundamental values and principles, etc.

This is where we show the design system and how to use it - including elements such as the logo, typography, colour palette, imagery, illustration, patterns, etc.

This part consists of providing guidelines on the brand personality and tone of voice. This is also where we start drafting examples of messaging.

The team at Jellypepper has crafted a distinct methodology to making brand books. We are essentially driven by four key principles:

Brand books don't need to be extremely lengthy. Ours go straight to the point as we believe too much information can be overwhelming, leading to a misunderstanding of the guidance and messages we're trying to get across.

The brand book is the biggest opportunity to show how the brand works in practice in terms of design and copywriting. That's why we pay attention to every detail so the document itself becomes a best practice use of the brand that any designer or copywriter can refer to.

The simpler, the better. We keep everything as simple and straightforward as possible. No need for fancy terms that no one would understand. The objective of a brand book is to consolidate and simplify, not to make things more complex.

At Jellypepper, we view brand books as more than just a series of guidelines. Its contents should be an accurate reflection of what the company is about. Brand books are an opportunity to tell the story of the brand and give a glimpse into its verbal and visual world. When flipping through the pages, it should feel as if we were entering the company's offices and meeting the team.

Because brand books are the ultimate deliverables when creating or refreshing a brand, we make sure they are carefully thought-through. A typical brand book developed by Jellypepper is a short, jargon-free, immersive document that acts as a best practice example on how to design and write.

Wondering how we create brand books? Get a glimpse into our approach and process when we develop these crucial guides.

How to make an effective brand book for clients

As of today, there have been 9,776,392 confirmed cases and 493,604 deaths worldwide as a result of the infectious disease COVID-19, caused by the most recently discovered novel coronavirus.

Some countries have been quick to adapt. New Zealand reported zero confirmed cases every day for almost a month and many other countries have implemented strict lockdown laws, social distancing guidelines and border closures in an attempt to flatten the curve (rate of growth).

Other countries have been less proactive or fortunate. The United States just reached 40,000 confirmed cases per day totalling 2,467,510 cases. Countries such as Belarus, Mexico and Brazil ignored the early warning signs and are now on the rise.

While this news is troubling and the global numbers show no signs of slowing (they're actually accelerating), I'm overjoyed to see the resilience of the startup community during this time. I count us lucky to work with an industry that already hold safety, health and remote work in such high regard.

Still, the general economic downturn has given us a little breathing room and time to think - evaluate how we work with clients and contractors.

In summary, in the last few months we have made sweeping changes to the way we run projects. Here are a few key changed we have implemented to do our part. Even better, they are changes that save you money, save us time and keep us all healthy. We'll be keeping some of these changes even after the pandemic has settled.

Our first and most obvious change is switching from in-person meetings to Zoom calls. While we absolutely love catching up for a coffee with you and informally talking through the details of your project over a double espresso, your health and our ability to serve you are paramount.

When we start a project, all meetings and catchups from kickoff to handover will be managed with Zoom and Calendly.

We're also putting a stop to our in-person workshops. Previously when it was time to kickoff a project, dive into brand strategy or figure out your new website's requirements, we would run workshops where we bring in some of your team and some of our team to hash out the details. This is a harder habit to break as there's no substitute for that real energy that comes from everyone coming together for a discovery session.

However, we can achieve the same end result online. Rather than working with you to figure out the specifics, we'll be switching to online forms like Typeform to assist us in gathering this content in a conversational way.

We sometimes send out gift baskets and swag to our clients and contractors to say thanks for their hard work. New studies suggest that the coronavirus may remain on surfaces for days, so we've decided to press pause on these and start spreading the love in Slack. Hopefully once the pandemic has settled, we can start bringing this back.

Every cloud has a silver lining. Jellypepper is a remote and distributed creative agency, so working from home means you rely on a stack of tools on a daily basis. Given how much these tools impact our productivity, we are starting to invest in our own tooling and plan to make them available to other agencies and freelancers once they're ready.

In the meantime, stay safe and wash your hands.

We are living in unprecedented times as a new pandemic sweeps the globe. Here's what we're doing to stop the spread.

Changes in response to COVID-19

In this edition of Workflow, we have Hayden Bleasel, Director of creative agency Jellypepper, talking about double espressos, multitude of devices and listening to Dirty Sprite.

Workflow with Hayden Bleasel, Director of Jellypepper

Hayden Bleasel is a product designer, React developer and studio director. He is currently the Director of Jellypepper, a creative agency for startups and tech companies.