Esri
Social media style guide
Client
Esri
Role
Social Media Design Intern → Student Technician, Influence Marketing
Duration
June 2023 – February 2024
Challenge
Esri had over 100 social media accounts across departments with no shared visual standard. Account leads were making their own graphics when the Creative team's turnaround was too slow, so the accounts looked inconsistent and unprofessional. The Creative team, meanwhile, worked like designers for hire with no consistent visual language of their own to hand off. Both sides needed a shared standard, and neither side had one.
Approach
Ran a listening tour of one-on-one meetings across Social Media, Account Leads, Creative, and Brand teams to understand what people actually needed before proposing a solution.
Surveyed account leads directly to poll the wider group beyond the stakeholders I could meet with one-on-one.
Ran a card sort workshop to figure out the information architecture that would actually make sense to the people using it.
Identified the real gap: account leads and the Creative team had no shared visual language, which is what was causing the inconsistency in the first place.
Designed original custom layouts in Figma, then discovered I couldn't get licensed access to use them internally, so I taught myself Esri's in-house, no-code ArcGIS Experience Builder from scratch and rebuilt the guide inside it.
Solution
Built a web-based style guide inside ArcGIS Experience Builder, a free, in-house tool, after my original Figma designs turned out to be unusable without a license. Designed it as a quick-reference tool rather than a dense document, so account leads could actually use it day to day instead of ignoring it. It covers brand voice, graphics standards, best practices, and resources, giving account leads and the Creative team the same shared language to work from instead of two disconnected processes.
Results
Style guide approved and launched in early summer 2024.
Adopted across all social media accounts spanning multiple departments and countries.
Improved turnaround time on new social media designs.
Turned a licensing setback into a self-taught, no-code build, done independently with no formal Experience Builder training.
