GOLDMAN SACHS

USING STORY-DRIVEN VERBAL DESIGN TO EVOLVE AND HUMANIZE MESSAGING FOR ONE OF THE WORLD’S LEADING INVESTMENT BANKS

If you’d asked me back in fine arts school what my least likely prediction for my future might be, it would likely have been that I’d one day have my very own Goldman Sachs email address. But life is full of the unexpected, and as R/GA continued to foster and grow the successful relationship it has enjoyed with the global banking behemoth since 2007, I was brought on to a series of specialized projects to help bring narrative cohesion and systematic thinking that reinforced the brand’s guiding philosophy and core values.

AGENCY: R/GA

ROLE: ACD, Copy & Verbal Design

IMMERSIVE PAGE EXPERIENCES

As part of its newly articulated brand purpose to advance sustainable economic growth and financial opportunity, Goldman Sachs was looking to elevate key initiatives around the organization that exemplifed this theme. It asked R/GA to create engaging webpages for each of these corporate projects, and we responded with rich, immersive design experiences that draw in visitors with a narrative arc that bridges the divide between daunting challenge and lasting change.

SIMPLIFIED GLOBAL NAV

Following our successful collaboration on its key initiative immersive experience pages, our Goldman Sachs clients requested that I be part of the team that would help examine and simplify their Global Nav. They needed their site to tell a more focused story that embodied the One Goldman Sachs philosophy — which meant IA and nomenclature that simplified engagement and balanced the story GS wanted to tell (based on its brand promise, core values, etc.) with the clarity and utility their clients seek.

The slides above show the path from mapping strategy through a functional approach to developing a narrative and ultimately achieving a simpler restructured information architecture.

TRANSACTION BANKING (TxB) PLATFORM

When Goldman Sachs looked to disrupt the staid (and some might say stagnant) world of Corporate Cash Management, it turned to the brilliant minds of R/GA’s Experience Design team, who invited me along for to lead copy. This was a design-centered project to be sure, but it required nuanced copy underpinnings to ensure that the language throughout was clear, approachable, and — perhaps most importantly — credible to a user base of senior corporate finance executives who routinely move hundreds of millions of dollars around the way the rest of us just Venmo each other.

Here’s how it all came together: