Highlighting the work and the people of in-house design, communication, and brand teams from companies around the world.

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Est.

2009

Headquarters

San Francisco, CA


Square was established to give every business owner an easier way to accept credit cards. We’ve grown our commitment since, offering purpose-built software to help run your restaurant, retail, and professional services operations, versatile e-commerce tools, embedded financial services and banking products, buy now, pay later functionality through Afterpay, staff management and payroll capabilities, and much more. We’re helping power businesses to succeed on their own terms.

Company size

5,000+

Industry

Technology

In-house team Est. 2019

Global Brand Creative Team

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We have many in-house teams that focus on specific hardware and software, but we, as the Global Brand Creative Team, are responsible for focusing on the overall Square brand. We champion our customers and their businesses, of all types and sizes, and center them as our “why” for everything we do. We do this through a variety of projects that span across all channels, but our work mainly falls under two pillars. One, our brand awareness campaigns, which champion the Square brand and influence subsequent campaigns. From this work we also build out campaign and marketing identity systems. Two, our creative systems work forms the backbone for all of our brand work and is integral in maintaining consistency across our foundational brand elements. This work means continually updating our visual and verbal identity systems and platforms, ensuring our brand system becomes more efficient and accessible for all teams at Square.

Team Members (53)

(AS OF PUB. DATE: Aug/8/2022)

Ben Aguirre

Copywriter

Trang Be

Copywriter

Alicia Cagnoli

Creative Program MGR

Ashley Corcoran

Visual Designer

Nick Dahl

Creative Program MGR

Bridget Dodd

Creative Ops MGR

Jess Dollano

Sr. Interactive Designer

Sherese Elsey

Photo Producer

Amy Feitelberg

Photo Art Direction lead

Jack Ferrante

Experiential Designer

Alex Friedman

Sr Video Producer

Brian Gagliardi

Creative Program MGR

Philippe Gauthier

Sr. Visual Designer

Robert Grashaw

Sr. Copy Editor

Evan Groll

Senior Video producer

Jen Holland

Copy Editor

Alison Howes

Production Designer

Neil MacLean

ACD

Julie Mastalerz

Sr Integrated Producer

Brandon Murray

Visual Designer

Lisa Omore

Visual Designer

Wesley Pan

Creative Program MGR O&O

Sue Park

Creative Project Coordinator

Aaron Poe

Design Director

Aaron Ruthnick

Video Producer

Alex Sirjani

Creative Ops MGR

Jonathan Skale

Sr. Copywriter

Erin Smith

Sr. Copywriter

Latia Spradley

Photo producer

Carl Sturgess

Art Director

Eileen Tjan

Group Creative Director

Sara Urbaez

Art Director

Justin Whaley

Copywriter

Johanna Williams

Creative Ops MGR

On working in-house…

Benefits

We each become an expert on our brand and our products, yet in our own ways. The range of creative experience and perspectives converging on one shared goal makes for a diverse yet unified voice that reflects both ourselves and our customers. Being our own client and agency, we also have the opportunity to truly own, advocate for, and influence our work in ways that usually wouldn’t be available to us. We’re working iteratively over time; building, growing, and evolving our brand with our partners across the company.

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Challenges

A natural side effect of being our own experts is that sometimes we see things a little too close up and lose sight of the bigger picture. This is true, too, of inadvertently creating copy or design “rules” for ourselves and making the mistake of not questioning and not revisiting the reasons for those “rules” in the first place. We stay constant with our brand, but we have to remember that the world around our brand is ever changing — a reminder that we can, too.

On working with…

Others

When our project roadmap is particularly robust, we’ll seek the help of freelance creatives. We also work with agencies, generally on two streams: campaign work and specialized brand elements like motion and typography. The benefits of bringing in outside freelancers or agencies span from the most functional side of resourcing to the thought partnership that happens when a fresh member joins our team. There’s a particularly inspiring energy that comes from collaborating with external creatives. It keeps our thinking malleable and our brand built by a diverse group of creative thinkers.

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Guidelines

The purpose of any good brand guidelines, particularly for an organization our size, is to create a shared understanding of our foundational brand assets and show how to use them properly. All the teams at Square work diligently to present a cohesive brand. In the end, it helps to codify common brand elements and provide some healthy guardrails. As the team responsible for publishing and maintaining the guidelines, we are mindful that a brand identity shouldn’t be locked in a way that only creates hard rules to follow. Our goal is to help teams understand the core brand — things that are good and true — and use it as a starting point. The best creative happens when teams adopt the brand guidelines and build upon them — bending them, but never fracturing them. Currently, we’ve built our brand guidelines as a Figma prototype with interactive elements baked in that allows for easy navigation and wayfinding. It links out to other working Figma files, design templates, and custom tools we’ve built for everyone to use in their workstreams. We’re in the early stages of building our own web-based brand portal that will create cohesion across every channel, house an accessible asset library, and be intuitively designed with consumer-facing and private, Square-only experiences. With the move to decentralization, it’s now more important than ever to have a centralized experience with a platform that is easy to maintain, update, and host.


Core Brand

Core Brand2022
OOH Print
OOH Print
OOH Print
OOH Print
OOH Print2022


OOH Digital2022
Social

Social
Social
Social 2022
Editorial & YouTube
Editorial & YouTube
Editorial & YouTube
Editorial & YouTube 2022

Campaigns
Campaigns
Campaigns

Campaigns
Campaigns 2021 – 2022


Otto Motion Tool
Otto Motion Tool


Otto Motion Tool 2022
SWAG
SWAG
SWAG
SWAG
SWAG
SWAG
Swag(available here)
2022

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