Brand & Campaign Design Systems
Research, Insights & Human-Centered Design
Art Direction & Visual Storytelling
Creative Operations & Team Leadership
Beyond the Style Guide: Strategic Brand Evolution for Global Leaders
From rigid corporate structures to humanitarian storytelling—how I navigate the "lines" of branding to drive growth, recognition, and resonance.
Brand Strategist & Creative Director; Systems Architect; Global Design Lead
I start every brand engagement with the same diagnostic: does this brand need protecting, refreshing, or rebuilding? Getting that call right matters more than any individual design decision — and I've made it across sports, entertainment, and humanitarian organizations.
My mission is to act as a bridge between high-level brand guidelines and the practical need for innovative, high-performing creative. My role involves:
The Auditor — I assess where a brand has gone stagnant and identify the specific levers (color, typography, iconography) that will revive it.
The Strategist — I find the room for standout creative inside strict brand guidelines, at organizations where the guidelines exist for good reason.
The Architect — I restructure global creative workflows, most recently taking the IRC from fragmented local styles to a unified enterprise system across five offices.
1. Finding the "Give" in Strict Guidelines: Working with high-equity brands like FedEx and Norwegian Cruise Line taught me that "consistency" doesn't have to mean "sameness." By taking a literal approach to NCL’s "Live Free" campaign—breaking elements out of frames and introducing accent colors to their wave graphics—I proved that you can highlight new features (excursions and activities) while remaining firmly within a premium brand ecosystem.
2. Humanizing the "Outdated" through Color and Joy: At Save the Children, the challenge was a brand that felt clinical and heavy. By shifting the visual hierarchy—reducing the dominance of stark red and black in favor of a vibrant, playful palette and a suite of 100+ custom-illustrated vectors—we centered the "humanity" of the mission. This invited participation from high-profile partners like Jennifer Garner and made the brand feel shareable, hopeful, and modern.
3. Scaling Innovation through Camraderie and Systems: At the IRC, the hurdle wasn't a lack of talent, but a lack of unity. The IRC transformation addressed fragmentation through a Figma Enterprise and Canva design system, templated toolkits for non-designers, and restructured approval workflows. This turned a culture of "siloed" offices into a collaborative community where high-quality, on-brand content is produced even in the face of funding cuts.
Global Brand Unity: Global brand consistency across five offices and 40+ markets, with a design system 50+ people can execute against.
Increased Engagement & Shareability: The Save the Children refresh modernized the brand’s digital presence, making social media content more vibrant and enticing for celebrity influencers and high-value donors.
Strategic Campaign Evolution: For Norwegian Cruise Line, my "Live Free" direction successfully shifted the focus to excursions and activities, driving new interest through OOH designs that literally and figuratively "broke the frame."
Efficiency in Crisis: By implementing scalable templates and enterprise design tools, I empowered lean humanitarian teams to produce beautiful, strong content during emergency responses, maintaining brand integrity even under extreme pressure.
