An intranet’s full potential remains locked without a sense of place and personality defining the digital employee experience.
By infusing bespoke graphics and thoughtful branding strategies that resonate with teams, HR builds community and boosts adoption of tools for attracting top talent.
While functionality matters on the best intranet designs, visual identity inspires adoption by fostering intuitive navigation, communicating culture, sparking curiosity through storytelling graphics and reinforcing purpose.
The following strategies transform sterile pages into vibrant hubs where work communities thrive.
Mirror External Brand Personality
Extending familiar public-facing aesthetic elements like fonts, colors palettes and graphic styles creates continuity between external marketing and internal engagement. Contrast Creative/Corporate intranet approaches with consistent Brand alignment:
| Creative Branding | Corporate Branding |
| Consistent fonts/colors | Aligned to logo |
| Playful illustrations | Reflects values |
| Friendly photography | Trusted reputation |
| Conversational tone | Professional polish |
This translates employer brand identity to the digital corridors connecting remote teams, telecommuters and hybrid co-workers.
Map Structure Intuitively
Though backend taxonomy plays a crucial role organizing content, top navigation architecture should arrange sections associatively to guide intuitive movement between logically connected pages.
Style groupings consistently and provide visual cues that orient user wayfinding through iconography, colors codes or illustrations symbolizing associated utilities.
Like road signs, strong information scent pulls visitors towards destinations using layered identifiers.
Encourage Exploration through Scroll-Stopping Graphics
Generous whitespace allows branded widgets, custom modules and bold immersive media to capture focus between information density.
Surprise and delight features that spark curiosity help carve unique niches for enterprise tools vying for adoption in a sea of apps and notifications.
Leverage popup windows, parallax effects, hover interactions, scroll-driven animations and cinemagraphs to choreograph experiences with pacing and details that sustain engagement.
Treat pages like a magazine where interludes between sections become opportunities to retain readers through arresting transitional moments.
Reinforce and Celebrate Core Values
Custom graphics inject organizational values into digital corridors through recurring motifs and messaging woven throughout the interface experience.
Integrate belief statements and taglines serving as cultural cornerstones while using related iconography as navigational landmarks.
From projecting founder quotes to spotlighting employee highlights, purposeful personalization fosters community on a scale.
When intranet aesthetics, activities and apps meaningfully interplay, HR strengthens bonds between the workforce, workplace and shared mission.
Vibrant intranet branding weaves continuity, navigability, curiosity and camaraderie into fluid cross-functional environments where productivity thrives.
Digital workspaces matching the innovation of teams within will unleash intranet success as the connective tissue in a new era of work.
Bring Remote Teams Into The Fold
With hybrid and fully remote teams at all corners, branded design continuity immerses distributed groups into familiar digital environments.
Pixel-perfect templates ensure all access the same on-brand experience regardless of physical location. Familiarity powers adoption.
Elevate Events and Comms
Cohesive branding permeates custom emails, virtual events, and microlearning through unified communications channels.
Consistent logos, stylized templates and tone of voice reinforce professionalism while keeping engagement friendly.
Demonstrate Employee Emphasis
When organizational branding prominently spotlights internal culture, purpose, and employee highlight reels, external candidates take notice of authentic priorities supporting talent needs during recruitment. Visual identity directly showcases what’s behind the brand.
