Free Association
Free Association
Work

eBay

A Playbook for brand decision-making.

Details

eBay set a bold new vision for their brand and company strategy in 2018, but needed help providing teams across the world with easy access, up-to-date info, and the clarity to execute with confidence. Free Association was brought in to create a single source of truth for all things brand — a digital platform called eBay Playbook, designed to speed up decisions across the organization and unite 15,000+ employees and agency partners.

Services

  • Product Leadership
  • Strategic Planning
  • Project Management
  • UX & Market Research
  • Testing & Measurement
  • Information Architecture
  • User Experience Design
  • UI & Visual Design
  • Interaction Prototyping
  • Brand Systems & Guidelines
  • Technical Strategy
  • UX Prototyping
  • Web Development
  • Design Tools

For nearly three years, we've collaborated closely to make eBay Playbook an elegant, useful and scalable platform that helps bring the brand to life.

Brand Building Blocks

We formed a content strategy, then reshaped comprehensive guidelines to clarify Strategy, Logo, Color, Typography, Photography, Iconography, Layout and Voice & Tone.

Executional Guidelines

We helped various teams build guidelines specific to their channels, tying all back to brand foundations — digital product, marketing creative, branded merchandise and more.

Design Guidance Tools

When design rules got too complex, we built them into simple tools. One helped users create brand-approved color layering options, while another generated color block layouts.

Asset Creation Tools

We created tools that can output production-ready creative assets with ease, reducing waste in the manual efforts that were required to design highly templatized elements.

Brand Resources

We centralized many key resources, including a Brand Showcase of the best execution worldwide, an Asset Library with all downloads, and a Glossary to build a shared language.

Community Feedback & Visibility

We established direct lines of communication via ZenDesk, so any user could easily contribute or ask questions, and the platform could represent known issues and updates in progress.