In-house Graphic Designer from 2017 - Present
Cornerstone Insurance Brokers Ltd.
Cornerstone is a family-owned, boutique insurance brokerage that has served Edmonton and Alberta for four generations. Cornerstone prides itself on providing unique insurance solutions tailored to its clients to keep them as protected as humanly possible.
Job Description
As the lone Graphic Design & Marketing Coordinator on staff, it was my job to coordinate with the leadership team of Cornerstone to determine the marketing and design needs of the brokerage and bring projects to life from beginning to end. When I started, my main priority was updating the visual identity to make it more appealing to Cornerstone's target demographic; insurance buyers looking for a more personalized, boutique experience in Edmonton, Alberta. Once the visual identity was established, I was responsible for ensuring it was properly utilized across social media, advertisements, and client communication through MailChimp.
Visual Identity
Before I started, Cornerstone's visual identity consisted of its logo (see below), black & white colours, and the font Segoe UI. While this visual identity looked sharp, it lacked a sense of personality that accurately reflected the local, independent nature of the business. When trying to build upon the visual identity, I didn't want to completely dispose of the assets that had already been in use, only build upon it to create a more complete & recognizable look that would appeal to Cornerstone's target market.
"Community Cornerstone"
The main piece of Cornerstone's updated visual identity is the "Community Cornerstone" look. The imagery used visually links the Cornerstone brand with their local community of Edmonton while evoking a sense of friendly personality through using subtle textures and warm colour tones. It is used across many different contexts such as print, social media, and digital PDF. See below for an example of it applied to letterhead:
Projects
Social Media
One ongoing aspect of my job was to create eye-catching, branded visual assets for social media. These included graphics for athlete sponsorships, contests, client testimonials, staff bios, and blog posts. Many of these assets utilize the "Community Cornerstone" look to give a standard, recognizable look to our posts.
Google Ads - "Insurance Made Effortless"
In 2021, we implemented Google Display ads to drive traffic to an e-commerce tool where visitors can purchase Tenant or Condo Insurance completely online. The goal was to communicate the existence of the new tool while evoking a sense of "effortlessness" to appeal to a new target market for Cornerstone - online shoppers.
The text describes the product they can buy (Condo or Tenant Insurance) while the imagery used matches the "effortlessness" theme to appeal to online shoppers looking for a simplified insurance buying experience. The models chosen are smiling at their phones to drive home the point that this is online shopping while also looking down toward the bottom left corner of the ad to point the viewer's eye toward the call-to-action, "Quote & Buy Online".
Video Content
Another project I completed was creating 30-45 second videos showcasing tidbits of insurance information to be used across social media, YouTube, and our website. The challenge with these was to create videos that relayed information about a fairly complex subject in a way that is easily digestible while working with a $0 budget. The goal of these videos was to incorporate a new medium into our social media mix while providing value to our followers as trusted insurance advisors and experts.
After writing the "script" of the insurance-related information, I carefully selected free stock footage & music that fit with the subject and mood of the video. Overlaid on top of the stock footage are the informative captions with some basic motion graphics applied to add some visual interest to the video.
