Brands are the embodiment of the vision, mission and culture of the business. And I have been very fortunate to work with brands that align with what I value. A company's culture is everything, because when everyone cares, you can harness and feed off the energy to level everything up.
It's simple. The people within the organization live and breathe a brand's values. How they show up for themselves, and look out for each other, reflects directly and positively on the brand promise that clients and customers experience.
Designs should be fun, purposeful, artful, thought-provoking and extensible. Most of all, it should be functional. And as a designer, in the context of brand building, my approach to good design is an iterative one. Design for the sake of change will often cause people to lose sight of what a brand stands for. While pushing the creative boundaries of a project, I always strive to maintain a balance between clear communication and brand awareness.
From years of designing experiences for conferences like RSA, Gartner IAM, Identiverse and more in the US and beyond, I welcome the spatial challenge of showcasing brands IRL.
I love collaborating with my marketing events team for events like SKOs and Town Halls, because I get to design and orchestrate everything, right down to the little details like personalized walk-on music and speaker notes font sizes on confidence monitors — to ensure a flawless production.
During the great COVID lockdown of 2020-2022, everyone everywhere turned to virtual experiences to connect, share and commiserate. Myself included. And just like the quest to "Return to the Office", the learning I've gained is that a hybrid experience is often better and more inclusive, especially for a global audience.
The success of virtual events lies in providing a simple and welcoming user experience. I have found that securing the right event platform with attendee features based on interactivity and gamification are usually a good way to engage with the audience and generate quality leads.
Content creation should never be dull or dry. Having seen (and briefed to create) countless brochures, white papers, datasheets, infographics and one-pagers for sales teams and customers, I know the value of a visually differentiated collateral.
After all, if we're going to be spending time, money and effort on producing content that's easy to digest, we also have the power to make it interesting. No matter what the subject matter is, I always try to make it a little extra by adding a non-vanilla approach, from concept to execution.
In the land of collaborative workflows, the speediest way to win is to provide as many self-service flows as possible, while ensuring that the creative team does not become a bottleneck. When everyone on the marketing team can do their job quickly and at-scale, the whole team succeeds.
I strive to empower each member of the team to do what they need to do, whether it's creating a white paper, a monthly webinar, social posts or a presentation to the board, I will gather requirements first, then create easily accessible and exportable templates, so each specialist can focus on making more content and worry less about the production process.
"Can the message be delivered differently?" This is a question I use to make sure that video content is an extension of the brand story and has a fresh perspective to offer.
With TikTok and YouTube Shorts owning our ever decreasing attention spans, corporate social content needs to be topical, real-time and align with the messaging pillars, while a longer form launch video needs to succinctly weave the brand story into the creative concept. When a story is well told, viewers feel rewarded for their interest and curiosity.
The authenticity of a brand voice is best delivered by those who are most passionate about what they do. That's why I love making culture videos. Whether we are shooting customer testimonials, capturing extra BTS footage for B-rolls or giving teams a medium to deliver shoutouts and praises to one another, people enjoy being included in the action. The positive energy and brand love is infectious — especially when they spot themselves on-screen!
It's inevitable. Just like the saying "Change is a constant", I believe Generative AI is the new "constant". And no, Skynet is not taking over — just yet.
Even so, I am taking a pragmatic stance on how powerful it is, and how to balance the usefulness of humans (creatives, in particular) in leveraging the wonderful capabilities of LLMs and prompt-based generative creative output.
Case in point: I made this video for a conference in Japan within a day. It has an AI avatar delivering the slides in Japanese, using content generated and translated by ChatGPT as a script.
These are just some of the examples of how I've taken a brief, a technical constraint, a request, a collaboration or a quick turnaround to provide a creative solution using the right tool and medium.
Check out my work experience >
.jpg)
