Systems
Layouts
Willis Towers Watson
Designing for every format at once
Some of the most interesting design work is invisible: taking a single visual language and making it hold together across every format a global business runs on, from a printed brochure to a dense data deck to a presentation someone with no design training has to build in twenty minutes.
/Role: Digital Designer
/Years : 2025 - 2026
/Scope: Design Systems | Template Design | Layout | Brand application
I was brought into a large global firm to take their visual language and make it work across print and digital, consistently, at scale, and usable by people who'd never opened a design file. Not to design the look, but to make it hold together everywhere it had to go.
Consistency stops being something you enforce and becomes something the system produces on its own.
01
Translating one language across formats
A visual language built for one format rarely survives the jump to the next on its own. I started by rebuilding existing material in the language, several ways for each format, to see where it held and where it fought.
This looked like production but worked as reconnaissance. By re-skinning brochures and presentations into the language multiple ways, I could find where it broke before committing to anything systematic. You learn a system's real limits by trying to break it across enough real cases, so by the end I wasn't guessing what a durable version needed, I'd already watched it succeed and fail in specific places.
02
One grid for every format
Re-skinning case by case doesn't scale, every new format re-solves the same problems. The fix was a single underlying structure any format could inherit.
I designed one grid logic meant to carry anything, a data-heavy deck, a simple presentation, a printed piece, off the same foundation. The point wasn't the grid; it was that work made by different people for different purposes could still feel unmistakably related, without anyone redrawing the relationship each time. Build the foundation once and consistency stops being something you enforce and becomes something people inherit.
03
A template anyone could use
A grid only matters if people can build on it, including the many across the business who aren't designers and never will be. So it had to become a master template that produced on-brand work by default.
On top of the grid I built the master presentation template. That meant solving the unglamorous problems, like images that broke the moment an untrained person touched them, which I rebuilt to hold no matter what was dropped in. The goal was something that looked exactly right but couldn't be used wrong: open it, add your content, and what comes out is still on-brand. The design lives in what the template won't let you do.
