Designing for Delight
Creating a sub brand for the Creative Market community
One of the most rewarding parts of my role at Creative Market is supporting the awesome work our Community Team does to connect with our members and audience. Each month, the Community Team randomly delights members with little messages, a practice appropriately dubbed Random Acts of Delight (or RAD for short). RADs travel through social media, email, and even good old fashioned snail mail. RADs are a way to congratulate folks on shop anniversaries, sales milestones, birthdays, or just to say hello — a little act of kindness meant to encourage our incredible members and express our thanks for being a part of the Creative Market community.
Why Create a Sub Brand?
In setting out to create a cohesive look & feel for our RAD program, we identified a few simple objectives for the RAD sub brand:
1. To create a unique set of resources (both digital and printed) for our Community Team to use when reaching out to folks.
2. To inject even more delight and joy into these little surprises. We want folks to love receiving RADs as much as we love sending them!
3. To create a sub brand that stems from the Creative Market personality.
Finding the Look & Feel
RAD visuals should feel celebratory above all — fun, colorful, and a little bit silly. We gathered style inspiration from carnival games, vintage typography, and pop tone colors. The RAD sub brand needed to feel rooted in our Creative Market personality, but with a little more whimsy — Creative Market meets Willy Wonka.
Designing the Elements
Primary Logo
After a few rounds of iterating on the primary word mark, we were drawn to the idea of bouncy, interlocking letters. We decided against introducing a central icon or illustration to the umbrella mark, reserving illustrated elements for the RAD swag.
Ultimately, the serif approach to the bouncy, interlocking letters added a nod to wood type that struck the right balance of fresh and vintage. The decision to keep the colors in the teal & yellow realm was a conscious choice to relate our RAD materials to the tones in our Creative Market brand green.
Spot Illustrations
Once we settled on a logo for the program, we did a group brainstorm to come up with a few silly messages to incorporate into stickers, tissue paper, and digital cards. Our team is pretty great at turning up the silly, so we had a short list of favorites in no time.
We designed stickers around our favorite messages and paired them with playful spot illustrations. In keeping with the bright, energetic feel, we leaned into inked and offset textures for the spots. Cartoon hands became a way to introduce a character without shifting the focus away from the person receiving the RAD. It was also a perfect opportunity to draw a unicorn, so we added one to the set for good measure.
Putting it All Together
Next came the most satisfying part: bringing it all to life! We produced a set of die-cut stickers, thank you cards, rubber stamps, and custom tissue paper in addition to a few digital cards for sharing on social platforms.
Thanks for reading! We can’t wait to delight members with all this RAD swag 😉
We’re always looking for amazing people to join the Creative Market team. We value our culture as much as we value our mission, so if helping creators turn passion into opportunity sounds like something you’d love to do with a group of folks who feel the same way, then check out our job openings and apply today!
