Kyle W. Johnston

I’m Kyle Johnston, a designer & creative director
This is my portfolio, my story, and contact info

Ferrellgas

Brand Evolution & Website Redesign

While leading the creative team at DEG, my team and I worked with Ferrellgas — one of the nation’s largest propane providers — to rethink their brand and voice, redesign their website, and more.

Contributions: Creative Direction, Design Thinking Workshop Co-Facilitation, Brand Development

Design Thinking Workshop

Informed by a quantitative customer survey conducted by DEG’s Analytics & Insights team, we organized a design thinking workshop to help Ferrellgas better understand their customers’ diverse experiences and develop strategies to connect with them as a trusted, hometown partner.

Using exercises like empathy maps and as-is scenarios, we helped the Ferrellgas team uncover insights that improved their brand positioning and voice. This foundational work informed subsequent projects, including the website redesign, improvements to their corporate intranet content, paid media campaigns, and more.

Scene from a brainstorm

The setting for our workshop

A few slides from our workshop…

Sample workshop slide 1

What is design thinking?

Sample workshop slide 2

Design thinking questions

Sample workshop slide 3

Exercise 1 – Empathy maps

Sample workshop slide 4

Empathy maps results

Sample workshop slide 5

Exercise 2 – As-is scenarios

Sample workshop slide 6

As-is scenario results

Website Redesign

Equipped with insights from our design thinking workshop along with brand guidelines we developed with assets provided by the Ferrellgas team, we set out to redesign the website.

Old Homepage

The old Ferrellgas homepage

New Homepage

The new Ferrellgas homepage
Ferrellgas homepage, mobile

Using a simple color palette along with custom photography and iconography, we brought the brand to life online, creating a consistent customer experience across all of Ferrellgas’ channels.

From the beginning of the project, my design team worked closely with the front end developers to develop a thoughtful experience for Ferrellgas customers:

  • With a significant number of Ferrellgas’ customers in rural areas, we wanted to ensure the website was fast, in addition to being easy to use. We agreed on performance budgets, which informed early design explorations and decisions.
  • Using a mobile-first design approach, we made features like location search more prominent on mobile devices.
  • During development, we used Pattern Lab and Atomic Design principles. This allowed everyone to experience the website on a range of devices and make better-informed design decisions.

Old Page Layout

The old Ferrellgas homepage

New Page Layout

The new Ferrellgas homepage

The Results

Based on the strength of the teams efforts with these and other foundational projects, Ferrellgas named DEG its agency of record in 2017, expanding the agency’s responsibilities to include local and direct mail marketing, traditional media, and local listings along with expanded digital efforts in the form of paid social strategy and video production.