McGraw-Hill Education

McGraw-Hill is a learning science company that provides customized educational content, software, and services for pre-K through postgraduate education. The company also provides reference and trade publications for the medical, business, and engineering professions.

The Brand Service was incorporated into an in-house team of 17 designers to organize and refine the library of existing content, thus streamlining future design time and saving hundreds of hours of labor.

Services provided:

Brand audit
Art direction
Digital design
Print design
Social media content
Presentation design

The challenge

McGraw-Hill currently operates in 28 countries, has more than 5,000 employees globally, and offers products and services to over 135 countries in 60+ languages. Years of shifting design teams and various departments creating their own curriculum led to a lack of grid and visual consistency.

The solution

Through our unique approach of operating within the in-house design team, we noticed several areas of strength within the existing content. We cast a wide net auditing McGraw-Hill’s entire content library, and highlighted the consistent elements which became the backbone of a new grid system. We refined existing content to fit our the new universal grid, and created a comprehensive Visual Language & Grid Exploration guideline document that demonstrates and educates designers on how to create content going forward.

In addition to the guidelines, we created templates that utilize custom character and paragraph styles, exponentially speeding up design time for all future projects, from simple email blasts to detailed long-form print documents and brochures.

The results

By investing in The Brand Service’s in-house services, McGraw-Hill Education was able to transform and rejuvenate a large library of content in record time. The new collateral and templates increased efficiency of the in-house designers and marketing department, while simultaneously removing a large margin for error throughout every touchpoint being handled by numerous designers.

Bottom line: A streamlined design across all touchpoints, unique and consistent visuals, hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars saved.