informed

As Head of Design & Brand at informed I directed all creative aspects and delivered across brand, product and strategy. After 5 months I was promoted to join the senior leadership team. I led a team of 5: for product design, marketing design, copywriting, motion, research, the photo desk and external agencies. A crucial part of my work centred around empowering and mentoring others. I implemented a brand redesign, full brand strategy refresh and app market launch. Further expertise included product management, strategy, creative concepts, campaigns or growth & retention strategies and implementation.

2022-2023 | Key Expertise: Head of Design & Brand, senior leadership, design leadership, design management, creative direction, brand/creative/product strategy, brand positioning, product management, team building, workshop facilitation, research, start-up

informed — The news, curated & summarised. 

informed bundles and summarizes the best news in one app, simplifying your news experience. Daily Briefs, curated by our experienced editorial team, deliver quality content in an easy-to-understand format. Access premium publishers ad-free – such as the New York Times, The Financial Times, The Atlantic or The Guardian, enjoy article translations and stay informed no matter how much time you have.

Product Hunt Campaign
Awarded #3 Product of the Day. Selected by the editorial team as their Daily Editor's Pick and reached an audience of 750k+ within 24h. Watch the Product Hunt explainer video here. 

New brand strategy, new brand redesign
In my first 7 months and leading up to our official app launch in November 2022, I implemented a new brand vision, positioning and strategy. We worked with A Color Bright on a brand redesign and launch campaign and aligned our visual identity with our new strategy and audience. The new branding showed the perfect symbiosis of known editorial principles paired with a contemporary digital spin on news consumption.

New brand guidelines
Spanning the entire brand universe from brand strategy to personas, from visual identity to tone of voice and editorial guidelines. From photography direction to iconography and how to apply everything in situ.
For each team (product, marketing, editorial...) I set up a notion page with quick links guiding them to the areas in the guidelines they need predominantly. This led to people using the guidelines more frequently, reduced time in looking for the right content significantly and kept the redesign fresh in everyone's mind.

App & Webapp: Features, research, product management and growth
Based on thorough user research we implemented highly loved features such as audio options and AI-powered time-saving summaries and article translations. Everything was aligned with our mission to deliver informative, quality news, and make it accessible to everyone, anywhere and any time. 

Launch campaign
To communicate both our app launch and the brand redesign most effectively and to avoid any confusion, we opted for a 2-in-1 long-term launch campaign that would address both. This enabled us to promote the app to a myriad of new customers while educating and exciting our existing beta users about the new brand language.
The launch and redesign led to #1 in ‘Top Charts in Magazines &
Newspapers’ in the German App Store as well as a 4.3* score in the App Store.

Marketing and social campaigns
I led the strategic and creative side of all social and marketing campaigns to use feature releases as a growth strategy.

Strategy and concepts for organic social as growth accelerator.
Within 10 months since the redesign and launch, informed gained 12k+ followers with a 20% MoM growth on social.

Katja Alissa Mueller
— design, vision, strategy