Trade School Design Direction for The Home Depot | August 2025 (ongoing)
As soon as Denise See joined the Pro team at The Home Depot, she started making changes to the Pro branding. The brushed steel look went away. A new business-forward color palette was introduced. The Pro sub-brand began advertising a LOT more. The grittiness that comes with being an authentic Pro replaced the brightly-colored videos and photography that had been done in the past.
In early 2025, the Pro brand shifted yet again, starting with a production that was nicknamed “Pro Surge” and introduced “Graphite Black” as the new Pro brand color and the official Pro tagline, “It’s About Time.”
As Trade School’s design lead over the Pro business, I had the job of leading my team to build out the full design system with direction from Denise and her team in-house at The Home Depot. The design system features templates that are flexible and can be used for lifestyle images as well as alternate versions that work for silos (cut-outs of individual products).
Originally referred to as a “toolkit,” we ended up creating a full brand book that is over 130 pages long. It’s a living document that is constantly being updated. The entire system is Figma-based using components and variables in the more than 120 templates we built into the system to fulfill all the various digital and print ad needs. Frame references for motion / video are also included in the system along with three custom Pro versions of the Digital Video Template created for The Home Depot in After Effects and Innervate.
Providing a cohesive look and feel across priority Pro capabilities
The design system had to be flexible enough to account for supplier-sponsored ads for the Orange Apron Media (OAM) team as well as including a color palette that would work with The Home Depot’s Tier 1 and Tier 2 sales events.
There are always “exceptions to the rules” thanks to platform safe zones and minimum sizing to prevent “pixel mush,” so we’ve built out more than 120 unique variations to be pixel-perfect and legible across every digital and print placement the media team can throw at us.
And yes, we do a LOT of print—both for trade magazines and Out-of-Home (OOH) billboards and signage.
