How Vista Careers partnered with 99designs Studio to deliver their branded illustrations

When your company is growing, it’s important to put your business brand, values and goals front and center. Doing this will help potential candidates know whether your company is the right fit for them, and helps your company hire candidates who believe in your values and can help you achieve your goals.

The Vista Talent Attraction team approached 99d Studio to create a set of engaging branded illustrations that would capture their values, goals and remote-first culture. With a Creative Director leading the direction, they found exactly the right solution to deliver a web illustrations set, at speed, which would complement and elevate their digital brand.

The client
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Vista is the design and marketing partner for small businesses around the world. They provide services for your marketing campaigns, branding and design projects—from creating social assets, to refreshing your logo, even to getting what you need to host your grand opening, Vista has got it covered.

As Vista continues to grow, so does the team. That’s why their hub for job opportunities across the Vista company, Vista Careers, required a branded illustration style to help celebrate their amazing global, inclusive and remote-first culture to potential team members.

The creative goal
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The Vista Talent Attraction team wanted to go the extra mile with their design and branding. They wanted to create a unique illustration style that would resonate with their audience and help them stand out. They also felt strongly about wanting to collaborate with the 99designs community to bring the Vista Careers brand to life.

The brief to 99d Studio was to develop an illustration style that would communicate their values, give a unique, modern and welcoming feel to the clean and simple aesthetics of their new website, designed and developed by their web agency Bayard.

With their new website about to launch, the illustrations also needed to be delivered with agility.

The creative process
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To lead the project, 99d Studio introduced Curt Johnson, a Creative Director at 99d Studio LA, to the Vista Talent Acquisition team, to lead this project. Curt has over 30 years in the creative industry in senior creative roles, working with brands such as Honda, to deliver seamless campaign creative.

First step was a discovery call to learn more about the needs and objectives of the illustrations, and to discuss some visual references, which the Studio team had asked the Vista Talent Acquisition team to supply.

Following this initial discovery session, 99d Studio Creative Director synthesized these learnings into a design brief and creative strategy that could be used to recruit design talent from the platform who would be a good fit for the strategy and style.

Curt worked with a small group of designers to deliver an initial concept each, from line drawn to more expressive, to the Vista Careers team. The concept that was felt to meet the brief the best was designed by Fe Melo.

Now that the design style was decided, Curt worked closely with the Vista Talent Acquisition team and Fe Melo to define the message for a further set of 12 illustrations. The goal of each illustration was to communicate a specific message about Vista on the web page, which included key themes such as making small businesses feel big and the amazing remote-first work culture at Vista.

These illustrations were placed across all sections of their website to make their values stand out.

The creative outcome
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99d Studio collaborated closely with the Vista Talent Acquisition team from start to finish, through Slack and Zoom,  to ensure the message and values were translated to the design direction, making it easy for Fe Melo to deliver the creative assets to brief, and with a quick turnaround. The brand new Vista Careers website launched in 2021, incorporating unique new illustrations.

Branded illustrations helped us to tell the story of our emerging remote-first culture and how it may look differently for each individual.

– Maureen Carroll, Senior Director, Talent Acquisition, Vista

The Vista Careers branded illustration set enabled Vista Careers to add a unique element to their website and brand, which they can re-use across other channels such as LinkedIn. This was a design-forward way to draw attention to the amazing culture that exists at Vista, and continue to be magnetic to talented people who are motivated by the Vista mission.

Through their partnership with 99d Studio, businesses like Vista are able to elevate their brand, with ease.

It gave us an opportunity to work with a newly acquired Vista business, 99designs and experience firsthand the brilliance of the 99d Studio and power of the 99d platform.”

– Maureen Carroll, Senior Director, Talent Acquisition, Vista