Michelle Anderson
Brand Design + Art Direction
Culture Playground
Gropyus set out to strengthen its internal culture through a new initiative called The Culture Playground—an interactive, digital experience designed to inspire, engage, and scale with the company. I was asked to lead the project end-to-end, creating a distinct cultural identity and building the experience within an existing internal platform. The challenge was multifaceted: a tight timeline of under one month, strict platform limitations, and a lack of a clearly defined brief or consistent stakeholder ownership. Both the content structure and the visual direction needed to be defined from scratch.
Approach:
As Project Lead, I guided the work from kickoff through delivery and documentation to ensure long-term usability and accessibility for future owners. I began with research and discovery to clarify goals, constraints, and employee needs, then developed three distinct design concepts to explore different directions for the culture identity and experience. After aligning with stakeholders on a selected concept, I refined the visual system, established content hierarchies, and designed a scalable framework that could live seamlessly within the existing platform.
Solution & Outcome:
I delivered a fully realized culture identity and interactive digital tool that balanced creativity with practical platform constraints. The final system was applied consistently across the experience, with clear documentation enabling easy handoff and ongoing iteration by the owning team. The Culture Playground was met with strong internal adoption and positive feedback, recognized for its usability, clarity, and overall design quality—successfully supporting culture building while setting a foundation for future growth.
Role: Project Lead — Project Management, Art Direction, Design Execution
Project: Culture Playground