Brand Systems                         Creative Concept                         Narrative Design                         Brand Scaling                         AI Creative



Brand Systems
My approach starts from foundational logic: structure, consistency, governance, and long-term adaptability.

DeepL
DeepL Foundation
PAFnow
DeepL I joined DeepL as its founding Brand Designer, establishing the foundations of the brand and building its first dedicated branding team. As DeepL evolved into a B2B-focused company, the brand required a fundamental shift, leading to a full rebrand with Pentagram.

As a Senior member within the Creative Studio, I led the deployment and evolution of the new identity across the organisation. I defined frameworks and creative systems across key tracks including iconography, editorial design, illustration, field marketing, web design, social media, and creative concepting for campaigns and global events, setting the principles and structures that governed how the brand was expressed across channels and teams.
SKILLS: BRAND EVOLUTION · GUIDELINES MANAGEMENT · ILLUSTRATION
TOOLS: FIGMA, ADOBE CREATIVE SUITE, MICROSOFT SUITE, GOOGLE WORKSPACE, CONTENTFUL
TEAM: ANA M. RODRIGUES (BRANDING DESIGN LEAD)

The foundation I built at DeepL became a reference for everything that followed. The visual logic established early on informed how key visuals were later conceived, how templates were structured, and how the brand scaled into new formats and markets. The components I developed became starting points for the new visuals, editorial layouts, and digital assets across teams.

Pentagram designed for the ideal, I designed for real day-to-day needs: key visual logics, narrative arquitectres for storytelling, templates. What stays fixed, what flexes, where resuable is appropriate and when is time for something new. Those decisions strenght the system; clear enough to survive handoff and rigorous enough feel unmistakably like one DeepL across environments nobody planned for.

I took ownership of these decisions while mentoring the team and continuously refining the system through practice. At this scale, the brand was constantly encountering new contexts and challenges; strong frameworks, shared design thinking, and close collaboration allowed the systems to evolve while still feeling unmistakably DeepL.

The system had to work beyond the projects I was directly involved in. Its real test was whether other designers, agencies, and teams could pick it up and keep building without starting from scratch.

  • 100+ modular illustration components adopted by 5 external agencies and 3 internal teams.
  • A complete iconography system and reusable library.
  • Editorial templates supporting 10+ major whitepapers and 50+ one-pagers.
  • Collateral systems spanning key marketing and sales touchpoints.
  • Print production workflows defining quality standards, briefing protocols, and file preparation.
  • Field marketing systems deployed across 117 events in 4 continents.

The numbers show the scale. The more important outcome was that other people could build on the system without having to reinvent it.



The system had to work in Figma and in a print production file. In a campaign and in a trade show. For a in-huse designer and for an external contributor working alone before a deadline. That is the real test of a visual system.



AI is now part of how I work, too. I’ve introduced AI workflows where they genuinely add value; whether that’s making production more efficient, speeding up exploration, or opening up new possibilities for creating visual work. More examples can be found in the AI Creative section.

Design principles for the AI era
The tools change. The thinking doesn't. I use AI to accelerate exploration, production, and iteration, but the system still needs a human point of view. The same principles apply: understand the problem, define the logic, make deliberate choices, and know when consistency helps and when it gets in the way. AI is useful when it strengthens that thinking.
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