YP can do that.

With print in decline, the company rebranded as YP, "the new way to do." Interbrand New York created the strategy and identity, and BarrettSF made the launch advertising. The brand spoke to "doers": people with a list of things to get done.

The identity was built on a doer's gestures. The yellow stopped being decoration and became a tool that pointed to the answer. That gave us something more useful than a logo. It gave us a behavior to repeat in every piece we made.

From September 8 to October 4, 2014, YP covered Grand Central Terminal during Advertising Week, the month marketers descend on New York. The terminal is one of the most visited places in the world, with close to half a million people passing through each day.

A station domination only works if it feels like one idea, not a hundred ads. The stairs carried the logo. The walls asked "Can the YP app help you get to the moon?" and answered with a rocket built out of everyday searches, each tagged with the yellow bar. It was the same question the national commercial asked.

I worked with internal clients and agencies on YP's national commercial: an astronaut who uses the app to get where he's going. Around it, the campaign ran everywhere a doer might look up. Billboards and a building wrap in Los Angeles. Magazine ads, display and retargeting, stadium signage, social content, food truck activations and agency events.

Every piece asked a version of the same question, "Can YP...?", and answered it with a real search sitting on a yellow bar. That one repeatable structure is what let a small in-house team produce a national campaign without it falling apart.

Make Every Day Local was built to drive brand consideration and app use. Well-known people, from country star Jake Owen to Cedric the Entertainer, sportscaster Hannah Storm and Ty Pennington, shared the local places they love, saved in the app's mybook feature.

I led the UX and UI for the campaign site: discovery, user flows and a modular framework. Instead of a grid of videos, each influencer got a scrolling story page that tied their film to their brand and to the businesses in their collection, with a clear path into the app.

The app was the product the whole campaign pointed to, so it needed its own content. A series of short social films each showed one real job the app handled, paired with a partner people already used: Uber, GrubHub, Fandango, OpenTable, gas prices and the Apple Watch. I also art directed a video series for mybook, the feature that saves your go-to businesses in collections like Home, Car, Kids and Date Spots.

Through my studio, The Creative Life, I also pitched two UX directions for a cleaner app that surfaced the most-used features first.

Behind the consumer app was YP Marketing Solutions, which sold search, display and web products to local businesses. I rebranded its main sales website. Visitors jumped between three product types, so I used color to set a clear hierarchy of calls to action and built a large submenu that walked each visitor to what they needed.

Then we let the data do the selling. Working with YP's data team, I designed a homepage tool that turns a visitor into a lead in two inputs. An owner picks their industry and enters a zip code, and the site maps the local searches they're missing without digital marketing. A series of motion graphics product videos and a print and tablet sales kit carried the same look into every pitch.

Local search lives on reviews, so YP for Schools gave people a reason to write them. Adults signed up with their school's promo code and reviewed local businesses in the app. Every review earned points, and YP turned the points into a donation of up to $10,000 per school. The brand system stretched to a community program: a landing page, app screens, a leaderboard and progress emails that kept parents coming back.