Identity system
A fast-growing Series A company had a logo and loose colour choices but no shared system, so every new screen and marketing asset drifted in a different direction and design became the bottleneck. The product needed a practical identity kit and living documentation so marketing and product could ship on-brand work without routing every request through one designer.
Role
I was the sole designer. I ran brand strategy workshops, defined the visual identity, wrote the guidelines, and built a Figma component library as the handoff surface. I deliberately scoped the system to the five most-used formats (social, deck, web, email, print) instead of trying to cover every future touchpoint, and I placed the source of truth in Figma rather than a static PDF so the team would actually use it day to day.
Approach
The engagement ran six weeks end to end. I used structured workshops to align opinionated founders on principles before showing executions, running two direction rounds that felt slow in the moment but avoided costly reversals later. A single typeface family was locked for cost reasons, so hierarchy came from weight, scale, and spacing rather than from adding more fonts, which ultimately made the system feel tighter and easier to teach.
Outcome
Within weeks of handoff, marketing could ship common assets without a design queue—while new teammates could ramp on the system using the same library.
1 day
Typical asset turnaround
Down from ~5 days for social, events, and decks
<1 day
Designer onboarding
Second designer ramp using the same component library
3 wks
Marketing self-serve
Standard assets shipping without design review
- Brand strategy
- Visual identity
- Typography systems
- Figma component library
- Design documentation
- Stakeholder workshops
- Design system
- Design QA