Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com are where learning happens. We are more than a global leading digital resource for definitions and synonyms, we are transforming the way the world engages with language. We crafted our new mission: We are an education publisher focused on creating delightful, credible experiences to celebrate and enjoy learning. We needed to reposition the brands as portals to invite our diverse and broad audience at each life stage into our world beyond words.

I led an internal exercise with the leadership team, creative (design and content), marketing and product team to define the brand’s character. Who are we? Who are we not? This conversation unites the organization through a shared understanding of why you do what you do and serves as a filter for decision-making across the organization.

We were in need to visualize and verbalize the brand to tell our story. We needed to build the framework for our team to execute our brand’s mission — create an inspired, modern, delightful, accessible and memoriable experience for our users through every touchpoint leaving them with a resonating emotional connection to our brand. We needed to highlight our value and differentiate our offerings from competition.

Dictionary.com’s new branding should be broad in its appeal and application, able to connect with students of every age, teachers, writers and English language learners.

The brand system brings a delightful sensibility while achieving optimum site performance. A custom variable font, integrates a range of weights to enhance type hierarchy, legibility, and expressiveness without sacrificing load time.

Thesaurus.com is the leading synonym and antonym provider in the world. Our audience primarily uses our product for writing. After much user led research, we created a writing tool, Grammar Coach. Taking writing to the next level, we provide our users the ability to further improve their writing, leverages our core product and capabilities that sets us apart from other writing tools.

About a month after our latest release, our NPS score has improved along with general feedback from our users. Our updated features for grammar and spelling check, formality and engagement check, and tone detection has been received well. We are continuously iterating on both the user experience front and the backend to create a smarter writing tool.

We heard from our loyal app users that games was of interested. In a few weeks sprints, we were able to launch an MVP Word Puzzle that users loved.