RetailMeNot
Brand Guidelines

PROBLEM

How do we unify the current RetailMeNot branding under a single creative direction for all of design?

MY ROLE // Lead Product Designer + Manager
Creative direction, competitor analysis, brand strategy, stakeholder alignment, visual design, design guidelines.

KICKOFF

Refreshing RetailMeNot’s brand guidelines had been a passion project of mine for years and getting the opportunity to take long-held ideas/goals and put them into action was a dream come true. As of July, 2025, RetailMeNot’s branding was in a visual and tonal crisis. Having been half designed by 2 agencies and interpreted by numerous designers working under different departments, it was hard to pinpoint any consistencies across the org.

I set up a small team that consisted of myself and Chon Shoaff ( Contracted Art Director/Designer ) to help me audit, research, define and execute on a refreshed creative direction for RetailMeNot. We began by reaching out to our partners in marketing, social, and branded content to align on areas the RetailMeNot brand could improve upon.

OFF TO THE RACES
The plan was simple, gather inspiration from top brands, competitors in our space, and design trends across all industries. I had Chon take lead on design analysis while I worked on stakeholder alignment. The design analysis served as a baseline to determine the type of brand we wanted to be and helped define the steps we needed to take in order to achieve this goal.

COLLABORATION
Together we collaborated on direction and made sure to include our Marketing Design Lead (Jenika Gonzales) to ensure cross-department alignment before we took mouse to artboard.

AUDIT

I conducted a large scale audit across Product and Marketing to pull the best designed pieces forward from the past year. We had already been leaning into a more simplified and sophisticated design style so the idea was to find the best way to embrace and empower this new look. Taking our audited pieces and using them as a baseline made it easy for us to find a path forward into elevating our look and feel.

DEFINE + DISCOVERY

Once we defined what we wanted to improve and build upon we outlined the foundational elements that needed to be addressed such as: typography, imagery, devices, color palette, shapes, iconography, modules, hierarchy, containers and buttons.

Once these were designed we were able to move onto the more large scale pieces that needed definition such as: email templates, display ads, banners, social, image lock-ups, product modules across web, extension and app.

DESIGN

At this point I had asked Chon to dive into the refinement and exploration of each of these elements. We met multiple times a week to review, critique and design together in order to create what is now the new and refreshed RetailMeNot branding.

We presented the new look and feel to executive leadership from Product and Marketing who blessed the new direction and set us off to create the guidelines that would not only serve to define brand rules for Prod/Marketing but for the company as a whole.

OUTCOMES
This guide is currently in use and has helped streamline design across sales, marketing, social, branded content and product. In the new year, we will be adding in seasonal palettes along with pre-defined shape-sets in order to help create additional design structure throughout our marketing campaigns.

The design guidelines are the culmination of many years of work and have a direct integration with the RetailMeNot design system “NED” to help further streamline product and marketing production.