Starting a thread for sharing wins, case study highlights, and recent work you’re proud of. Not just “look at my portfolio” but the specific thing that went well and why.
I’ll start: just wrapped a 6-month rebrand for a mid-market fintech company. The challenge was modernizing without alienating their existing institutional client base - these are people who associate “clean and modern design” with startup instability.
What worked: we anchored the updated identity in their longest-standing brand element (a specific dark navy that had been in their materials since founding) and used it as the continuity thread through a system that was otherwise significantly more contemporary. The result is something that reads as “evolved” not “replaced” to the existing base and “credible and current” to new targets.
The metric that mattered: their sales team started using the new pitch deck without us having to push adoption. That almost never happens spontaneously. Means the materials actually fit the way they work.
What’s a recent project you’re proud of? Specific detail over general description - the specifics are what’s interesting.
Recent win: packaging redesign for a specialty food brand that had been using the same label format for 11 years. The challenge was keeping the heritage elements (their founding year, a hand-drawn ingredient illustration) while making the shelf presence competitive with the contemporary natural food brand aesthetic. The compromise: kept both elements, refined the illustration digitally but to feel hand-made, moved them into a premium position in the layout hierarchy rather than the bottom.
Just finished a logomark for a sustainable materials company. The brief wanted something that communicated cycle/renewal without the overdone circular arrows. Solution was a letterform that reads as both the company initial and a single continuous path - the renewal is implied by the form rather than illustrated.
@voidvibes92 the spontaneous adoption metric is the most honest measure of whether the work actually fit the need. Materials people use because they’re supposed to vs materials people reach for because they work - completely different outcomes and you can usually tell which you got.
Shipped a motion system for a product app last month. Proud of this one because it was the first project where every animation had a written rationale in the design spec - each micro-interaction has a one-sentence explanation of what it’s confirming for the user. The developer picked it up without a single question.