SketchUp
Brand Strategy & Visual Identity

Studio: Trollbäck+Company
Role: Chief Creative Officer

SketchUp is a beloved 3D design software whose founding promise no longer matched its capabilities. We evolved SketchUp’s brand for a new era, updating its legacy positioning into a more desirable, premium, and professional brand with greater appeal to AEC professionals.

Together with Trimble’s M+A, SketchUp is evolving to meet the needs of serious AEC professionals—without losing long-tail users. SketchUp desired to be taken more seriously and graduate from its legacy affiliation with Google and its “3D for everyone” positioning.

Our brand strategy reflects this evolving ecosystem and empathizes with users’ diverse needs to retain credibility. Our partnership focused on bringing clarity to SketchUp’s vast capabilities, highlighted a product experience that’s more intuitive and creative than the competition, and emphasized SketchUp's superpower: helping people communicate and develop their ideas.

View the full case study at Trollbäck+Company.

To suit evolving industry workflows, we positioned SketchUp as a premium platform and powerful tool for serious AEC professionals. Our newly optimized identity system champions better ways of working, captures the spirit of a product people love, and supercharges brand creativity and communication.

Collaborating with the SketchUp team, we transformed a product-first approach into an inspiring and actionable framework that allows SketchUp to authentically own its new ambitions. We articulated a singular vision which acts as both a unifying rallying cry and a future-facing north star to align and integrate the efforts of the product, engineering, and marketing teams.

A newly optimized design system gives SketchUp the tools to be clear, creative, and consistent across touchpoints. Using the foundational elements from SketchUp’s parent company Trimble, we created a more flexible system that leverages the design language of the product itself.

Now, the visual identity is additive to users’ software experience, including UI-derived details, dynamic typography, and a refreshed color palette. The expanded toolbox empowers SketchUp staff to be more creative and efficient with clearly documented guidelines—a first in the company’s history—in order to quickly build advertising, social content, imagery, and video for all of its platforms.

Innovative custom-coded animation templates make more possible. SketchUp teams use their always-on channels to create daily content. Early in our collaboration, we identified a need for a unique motion toolkit that would enable them to animate completely within Adobe Premiere editing software without using After Effects.

In order to seamlessly integrate the new toolkit into SketchUp’s post-production workflow, we coded MOGRTs (motion graphics templates) that allow their editors to spend more time on storytelling and less on time-consuming animation. The new motion toolkits extend the brand’s identity into 3D space similar to the SketchUp software, and even allow for easy integration of images and objects from SketchUp’s proprietary 3D Warehouse library.