About the Author:

Peter Deltondo is a Product Designer turned Product Founder who spent the last decade leading teams, Co-Founding Heyo, a design and development agency, and Co-Founding products, including Eventrise and Keyvo. The list of clients he’s worked with includes Figma, Adobe, Discord, Facebook, Merck, and Toyota. In his free time, he can be found in a river fly fishing or spending time with his family in the great outdoors.

As a product design agency, we’re usually working with a client who hands us a brief and we design and build under that framework. But because we’re problem-solvers, we became our own client a few years ago. We set out to build our own event management software, based on the pain points we felt with the major platforms in the space.

That project became Eventrise. We’ve shared why we built it, so now we talk about how we did it. The five principles that got us from a Figma file to a live product: the same ones we’d recommend to any brand, product or agency trying to do what we did.

1. Audit what competitors have quietly agreed not to solve

Most competitive research stops at “what do they do well.” But we knew that was the wrong question. The ones we asked were: what have they ignored? Where are they letting the user down? What are they doing entirely wrong?

We pulled up competing event platforms and analyzed them in Figma, screen by screen, every flow, checkout step, and piece of onboarding. We identified where the user flows broke down, where it felt like real event organizers or attendees would be left behind. What were the features, that we as event organizers desperately wanted, but were ignored by all these platforms?

The pattern was consistent:

• Every platform had solved event ticketing reasonably well.
• Almost none had solved the elements around it: workshops, add-ons, meet-and-greets.
• Those pieces lived on separate sites, checkouts, and made the platform more complicated and confusing.

If you’re auditing a crowded category and everything you find looks like a feature comparison, you’re not done yet. You’ve got to ask the right questions and look for the problems you actually need to solve.

This has sparked a lot of “Oh my gosh! This is what we’ve been wanting forever!” during calls with organizers and venues. They were all picking the platform that either checked the “most boxes”, but still wasn’t meeting their needs, or doing hacky things themselves to try and creatively solve these pain points. Who would have thought simply building what your audience has been begging for could work so well?…

2. Rebuild the whole thing when you need to

After some market research, we got to building. Part of why we built Eventrise for conferences, was because of our very own Heyo designer Mike Jones, has been running Creative South, a design conference coming up on 15 years. Heyo Co-Founder, Peter Deltondo has been volunteering alongside Mike for the past 13 years. Yet, as we worked, we realized we’d been building for a smaller opportunity: A conference happens likely once a year. A venue runs events almost every day.

So, we reworked navigation and checkout to genuinely serve two kinds of users, instead of just adding “venue mode” onto a conference tool.

We believe that this is the principle that differentiates a good product pivot from just making things look good: when the real opportunity turns out to be different from the one you started with, rebuild. Being flexible and moving when you need to is a superpower. 

3. Know when to kick it into high gear

After piloting ticket sales at Eventrise at Creative South in early 2025 and seeing the massive excitement from other organizers in the crowd, we started investing in Eventrise on another level.

• We built dedicated teams around it
• We made our first full-time Eventrise hire, a Head of Marketing & Sales

The planning phase had done its job, but it was time to put some real weight behind it. A real team meant real requirements, real prioritization, and a process built for launch instead of exploration.

The shift from “we’re building this internally” to “we’re building for a global user base” was an important one for the future of the platform.

4. Keep one team for the whole build

The same team worked across brand, product, and engineering for the entire build. No re-explaining context between a brand shop, a design agency, and a dev contractor. Every handoff costs you consistency, time, and patches needing to be made later.

That’s part of why Eventrise feels coherent in a way that tools cobbled together from separate vendors often don’t. Every decision made in the brand system was made by people who also understood the checkout flow. Every product decision was made by people who understood what the marketing site needed to feel like.

If you’re a brand comparing service providers for a build like this, this is the question that matters most: who’s actually in the process for the whole thing, start to finish? It shows up in the final product more than almost anything else.

5. Design one flow, not a patchwork of flows

One of the early product solves was figuring out the checkout flow. Jumping around in a product is exhausting, especially when you’re trying to buy tickets. We built tickets, workshops, meet-and-greets and every type of “add-on” you can think of into a single checkout. We saw a big uptick in workshops purchased at Creative South this past year compared to years past, as this heavily reduced friction and made the workshops so much easier to find, rather than having to purchase a separate ticket from general admission sales. 

Finding the gap isn’t the hard part, we recognized the challenge early in the research process. The hard part is designing the one flow that actually closes it, and helps every user have the best experience.

The Result

Eventrise is live online today. The web app is robust but we also have mobile apps for both attendees and organizers that are built out to do nearly everything the web app can do.

• Payouts land in one to one and a half days, directly into the organizer’s own Stripe account.
• Tax-exempt purchases are handled automatically, with approval typically landing in thirty to sixty minutes.
• Tickets, workshops, and add-ons run through a single, unified checkout.

Since launch, we’ve kept shipping: custom checkout questions, a Zapier integration, team roles, venue landing pages, attendee detail pages, a live multi-event dashboard, scheduled email reports, and pre-sale access codes. Merch sales and lanyard printing are next.

None of that came from a single good idea. It came from lots of small decisions, made in order, each one setting up the next. 

You can follow the ongoing evolution of Eventrise on the website as well as right here on the Heyo team Dribbble page.

About the Author:

Anthony Dutcher is Founding Partner at Vix Media Group, a Denver-based agency working across healthcare, technology and media. His team is deliberately split between agency and in-house backgrounds and runs its own infrastructure, so it has sat on both sides of the brief. He believes research should decide the design, not decorate it.

Most agencies start a website with a sitemap, a mood board, or a request for three sites the client likes. I have started projects that way too. It feels productive because there is finally something on the screen.

But it also skips the buyer.

A website starts when somebody admits what they are afraid of buying. It starts with the search they type at midnight, the complaint they repeat in a forum, the competitor they almost trust, and the proof they need before they will fill out a form.

That is why I do not see psychographic segmentation as a research appendix. It is the first growth artifact. Done properly, it sets the direction for the brand, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), content, interface, paid media, and measurement. The website is where those decisions finally become visible.

A persona is not a psychograph

A persona is usually neat. It has a name, an age, an income, a stock photograph, and a polished quote nobody actually said. I have never watched a fake persona settle a real argument about a headline or a page.

A useful psychograph is messier because buyers are messy. It asks what people are trying to protect, what they distrust, which alternatives they compare, how much they already understand, and what must become true before they act.

Demographics still matter. A service business needs to know whether its market exists within a practical distance. Search demand matters because stated interest and active demand are not the same thing. Competitors matter because positioning only becomes useful when it creates distance from a real alternative.

The difference is simple: a persona describes a person. A psychograph maps a decision.

That map should be sourced. I want dated demographic data, natural search queries, accessible public discussions, real competitors, and a clear line between evidence and strategy. If the public language does not converge, I would rather mark the signal thin than turn one vivid comment into a market truth.

Case Study: one market, 11 threads, four segments

One recent local-service psychograph shows what that means in practice. The research was completed in August 2026 for one launch market.

The final working set contained 11 buyer-matched public discussion threads with 11 accessible source links. It tested nine service concepts with positive local search demand. Those concepts represented 410 directional searches per month within one defined 10-mile radius in the August 2026 keyword snapshot. It also evaluated six Google Maps competitor categories inside that same market.

410 is not a heroic number. That is why I like it. It is the honest size of the opportunity visible in that market and window, not an inflated national figure slipped into a local strategy deck.

I am not saying that from a small vantage point. Across our roster we manage more than $20 million in media a year and ship more than 50 sites, brands and web applications, and those clients collectively earn over $600 million annually. That revenue belongs to the clients who made it. We build the system underneath it. I mention it only because scale is what makes 410 worth saying out loud. When you have spent enough money on a wrong assumption, you stop wanting the flattering number.

The output did not become 11 quotes pasted into a deck. It became four role-based audience segments and four intent stages: informational, investigational, transactional, and retention.

Those numbers matter because they force useful questions. Which audience already understands the category? Which audience needs proof before price? Which searches belong on service pages? Which concerns need a comparison article? Which objections should a consultation page answer before asking for contact information?

The campaign can keep returning to the same source instead of inventing a new audience every time the format changes.

One buyer truth should change the entire system

I keep coming back to one test: what did the research make the team change? In that August 2026 project, the buyer logic centered on capability, credible guidance, restraint, and protection from hype. Those factors became the strategic spine of the psychograph.

The client was still in the planning stage, so I cannot honestly point to a live redesign and claim the research improved conversion. The first useful effect is more basic: the next creative decision now has something to answer to.

This is where brand strategy should stop being a logo exercise. A buyer looking for credible guidance should not meet a brand that behaves like an excited salesperson. The language needs restraint. The identity needs confidence without theater. The proof hierarchy needs to show who qualifies, what happens next, and where the boundaries sit.

The same finding changes the search plan. Someone early in the decision needs education. Someone comparing alternatives needs differences and evidence. Someone ready to act needs process, fit, location, and a clear next step. Someone who has already purchased needs follow-up content that supports retention.

That creates a more useful SEO architecture than a spreadsheet of keywords. Search demand decides where opportunity exists. Psychographic research decides how the page must answer it.

The brand, sitemap, and content should feel related because the same buyer logic shaped each one. If they do not, the psychograph probably stayed in the deck.

A high-converting website is a decision path

A website does not convert because the button is violet or the headline is shorter. It converts when the page meets the buyer at the right level of understanding and removes the next meaningful uncertainty.

That changes information architecture. If price opacity is the loudest anxiety, pricing cannot stay buried until a sales call. If distrust is the barrier, proof and qualification belong before the form. If comparison is the dominant behavior, the site needs pages that help people compare without pretending every option is interchangeable.

Design still matters enormously. Hierarchy, motion, typography, pace, contrast, and interaction shape whether the experience feels credible. But every aesthetic decision should serve a business decision already made.

The website build then has a clearer job: preserve that logic across devices, load quickly, expose content to search, pass leads into the right system, and make the next step obvious without becoming aggressive.

This is the part that makes Vix different from a design studio that stops at launch. The site is the center of an acquisition system, so launch is when the strategy starts collecting consequences.

Paid media turns the build into a feedback loop

The research sets the initial direction. The market gets the final vote.

Paid media tests which promises earn attention, which audiences respond, and which objections survive contact with the page. Search behavior reveals new questions. Form behavior exposes friction. Sales conversations show where the message still overpromises or underexplains.

Attribution tracking connects those signals back to the source instead of leaving the team with clicks, impressions, and a vague feeling that the campaign worked.

That loop matters because a psychograph is a researched hypothesis, not a permanent truth. The launch gives it consequences. The data after launch should refine the messaging, page order, content roadmap, creative, and audience model.

Research informs the brand. The brand sets the content and design system. The site converts demand. Paid media creates controlled pressure. Measurement shows where the system is right and where it needs to change. That is what I mean when I describe Vix as a growth engine.

Artificial intelligence is leverage, not judgment

Artificial intelligence helps when it expands what the team can inspect. It can collect public discussions, organize language, group objections, compare sources, and surface repeated patterns faster than a person reading one tab at a time.

It cannot decide whether the loudest comment is representative. It cannot rescue stale geography. It cannot know whether a search term reflects the service a business should actually sell. Those decisions still require judgment, client context, and a willingness to reject convenient evidence.

The August 2026 psychograph used artificial intelligence to accelerate source collection and synthesis. The final set still required accessible links, buyer fit, current geography, and a person willing to throw out convenient evidence. Sourcing can scale. Judgment still has to be earned.

What the research still cannot promise

I do not know whether 11 public threads represent every high-value buyer in a market. I do not know whether stated concerns predict behavior until the pages, ads, calls, and conversions create a second evidence layer. I do not know whether a strong psychograph will survive a competitive move six months later.

That is not a flaw in the method. It is the reason the method has to continue after launch.

A psychograph should be specific enough to change the work and provisional enough to be corrected by the market. If it becomes a polished document nobody revisits, it has failed.

So here is the question I would ask before opening Figma: if the audience research disappeared tomorrow, would the brand, sitemap, content, ads, or conversion path change at all?

If you are not sure, that is the useful answer. Vix Media Group runs a free marketing audit that opens with the same question.

About the Authors:

Garik Avetisyan, Davit Gabrielyan, and Anastasia Saroka are co-founders of Flexy Global, a design and development partner for startups and global enterprises. Garik built and successfully exited a consumer app used by millions. Davit brings 15 years of experience leading complex projects and operations at international companies including Orange and Coca-Cola Hellenic. Anastasia, Design Director at Flexy Global, brings experience designing products for large corporations and startups in the fitness industry. Together, they are guided by the belief that advanced technology creates greater value when people can understand it, trust it, and use it confidently.

About 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots studied by MIT’s NANDA initiative delivered no measurable return.

The number points to a problem beyond model quality. An AI system can perform well in a demonstration, be deployed across a company, and still contribute little to the work it was meant to improve.

Daily usage does not necessarily prove otherwise. Employees may be required to use a tool while continuing to verify its answers elsewhere, ignore its recommendations, or build workarounds around it. The system is being used, but it has not earned a meaningful role in the decision.

Over the past two years, our team at Flexy has designed AI for compliance reviews, contact center conversations, investment decisions, and other workflows where a wrong answer can create customer, financial, or regulatory risk. Across that work, we learned that model performance is only part of the design challenge. The interface must also help people understand what the system knows, where its authority ends, and what to do when the answer does not look right.

Here are five decisions that changed how we design enterprise AI.

1. Make every recommendation traceable.

In enterprise AI, the most important experience often begins after the answer appears.

Every recommendation needs to be traceable. A compliance officer, financial specialist, or contact center agent should be able to open the trace report, follow the evidence chain back to its source, and understand which rules, documents, or signals shaped the output. The interface needs to provide a clear audit trail, not simply a polished final answer.

This principle shaped the KYC compliance agent we built for a European insurance group. Compliance officers had been working across fragmented internal systems, external registries, archived files, and documents in several languages. They manually reconciled identity, policy, and risk information, then reconstructed the reasoning trail if a decision was audited later.

The system we designed brings those sources into one workflow. It uses more than 200 verification and enrichment tools to cross-check information and prepare a structured KYC assessment. Each conclusion is connected to a risk score, supporting evidence, and its original source. The officer can inspect the assessment and focus on the exceptions that require professional judgment.

The design question was not how much of the system’s reasoning we could display. It was what the officer needed to verify the recommendation. The final hierarchy therefore gives priority to the assessment, the evidence that shaped it, any discrepancy that could change the outcome, and the source record. The complete trace remains available without competing with the immediate review task.

This is trust calibration in practice. The interface gives people enough evidence to evaluate the output without presenting more confidence than the system has earned.

2. Give AI clear boundaries.

AI autonomy should be calibrated at the action level.

A system may safely collect documents, normalize information, and flag discrepancies. Actions affecting a customer’s identity, eligibility, finances, or access should not be executed with the same level of autonomy.

Our working rule is straightforward. As the potential impact of an error increases, the agent’s decision-making autonomy should decrease, with mandatory human review before execution.

In the KYC workflow, the agent handles much of the repetitive verification while the compliance officer reviews the evidence and approves the assessment. This is human-in-the-loop design with a defined control point. The person steps in where context, accountability, or professional judgment matters.

Design for agents. Design for humans. Keep the difference.

An agent needs context, tools, permissions, and a defined goal. A person needs evidence, control, and a clear recovery path when the system gets something wrong. Good AI interface design makes both sets of needs visible and keeps ownership of the final decision unambiguous.

3. Put AI where the work happens.

Enterprise teams already move between too many systems. If AI becomes another destination they have to remember to open, it adds friction before it adds value.

The better approach is to place assistance inside the workflow, at the moment the user needs it.

We followed this principle when building a real-time AI copilot for a bank’s contact center. Before the copilot, agents had to listen to the customer, track changing intent, recall internal procedures, and search policy documents during the same conversation. Two people handling a similar request could reach different answers depending on their experience and how quickly they found the right information.

The copilot works within the live call. It transcribes the conversation, separates the speakers, follows changes in intent, retrieves relevant information from approved internal sources, and surfaces a suggested resolution inside the contact center interface.

For our designers, the main constraint was attention. The interface could not compete with the customer for the agent’s focus. The current intent, suggested action, and supporting source had to be understood at a glance.

A correct recommendation that arrives too late, takes too long to read, or sends the agent into another screen is not useful during a live conversation. Timing and hierarchy are not finishing touches here. They determine whether the AI can support the work at all.

This is agentic UX in practice. The system completes several connected steps behind the scenes while the service decision remains with the contact center agent.

4. Design the agent, not just the screen.

Enterprise AI UX extends beyond layout and visual hierarchy. The agent’s name, voice, prompts, response structure, evidence, uncertainty, and recovery behavior are all part of the experience.

This becomes especially important when different departments introduce AI independently. Finance may have one assistant, HR another, and customer support a third. Even if they use the same visual components, they can feel unrelated when they have inconsistent names, speak in different voices, structure answers differently, or express confidence in conflicting ways.

The question many design teams are asking: Has anyone successfully integrated AI into a large enterprise design-system workflow? The answer requires more than adding an AI component to a design library. Consistency must extend to how agents identify themselves, explain recommendations, ask for confirmation, escalate uncertainty, and respond when they cannot produce a dependable answer.

This changes the designer’s role. Enterprise AI designers help shape the end-to-end experience, including agent naming and character, voice and tone, prompting and response quality, evidence presentation, feedback mechanisms, and recovery paths. They also help define how corrections, overrides, and user feedback are captured so those signals can support continuous evaluation and improvement.

The interface is no longer only the screen. It includes everything the agent says, does, and learns from.

5. Test whether people know when to trust it.

A completed task does not prove that the user understood the AI.

Someone may accept a recommendation because it looks polished, without noticing weak evidence or realizing that an important check was never completed. Traditional usability measures such as completion rate and time on task will not reveal that problem.

In our AI UX work, we return to three questions.

• Can the user understand the recommendation and find the evidence behind it?
• Can they recognize uncertainty and know where their judgment is required?
• Can they correct, override, or escalate the result?

We remember these checks as Understand → Question → Act.

After launch, we also examine where people correct recommendations, request help, dismiss suggestions, or return to manual work. These behaviors show whether the system is supporting better decisions or simply adding another required step.

Training can explain what an AI system is supposed to do. The product itself must help people decide when to rely on it, when to question it, and when to take control.

From Enterprise AI UX to AI Design Leadership

Designing enterprise AI has changed how we see the designer’s role. Through our work at Flexy, we have learned that the experience extends far beyond individual interactions. It shapes the quality of decisions, the boundaries of the system, who remains accountable, and how the AI improves through real use.

These lessons led us to implement the AI Design Leadership Framework. It brings our approach into one connected practice: make the system show its work, give it clear boundaries, place it where the work happens, design its behavior as carefully as its interface, and learn from how people use it.

For us, this is the shift from AI UX to AI design leadership. It means going beyond usable screens to shape systems that people can understand, govern, and improve with confidence.

The model may produce the recommendation. AI design leadership determines whether that recommendation is traceable, appropriately bounded, useful in the moment, and capable of improving through responsible use.

About the Author:

Vicente Reyes Montealegre, heads Afternow’s Brand and Web teams to guide SaaS companies, enterprises, and fast-growing startups in their digital journeys. The agency’s work spans strategy, brand, website, product and development, all under one roof, all connected to one vision.

A big part of our story as an agency runs through this community. Dribbble is where Balkan Brothers / BB Agency, the agency Afternow used to be, first found an audience beyond Krk. So, it felt like the right place to get into the in-house details of our company rebranding. 

We’re five months into rebranding our agency, and we’ve talked a lot about it. Our new positioning, the strategic and business decisions that drove the change, how we’re operating moving forward.

What we haven’t touched much on is the visual identity itself, the pure graphic design bit, and how a project like this brought our design teams together like never before.

We’re sharing part of the process here for the same reason we’d want to see it from another studio, a look at what it actually takes to give our brand the same care we give client work.

Lesson 1: Build an identity that grows with you

Our old identity was built for a smaller, more local version of the agency. It worked when we were a small studio taking briefs from startups mostly looking to revamp a website. It stopped working soon after we became a proper agency: fifty-plus people working with enterprise tech companies across strategy, design and technology. That shift had happened years before the identity caught up, and small refreshes along the way weren’t enough to close the gap. The relationship we were trying to build as strategic partners kept meeting clients through a visual language that still read as a small studio taking on freelance work.

With little room to move, our old typeface, palette and overall look applied the same way whether we were pitching to a Series C company or posting on Instagram. Nothing wrong with consistency, but consistency without range started to look like a lack of imagination, which doesn’t play well for a design agency.

So the brief was clear: build an identity with real range, tight enough to signal the maturity of our services and audience, loose enough to keep experimenting and push our creative work forward. Something that could hold both ends without snapping in the middle.

Afternow: from conceptual to systemic thinking

The name itself gave us the logic before we’d drawn a single shape. Afternow sits between two ideas: grounded in the now, shaping the after. Rooted in the complexity and constraints of the present, and ready for whatever comes after it, our new name carries a built-in instruction: keep evolving. Once we saw the identity needed to hold both at once, the concept stopped being just a name and became structural. Fixed and flexible by design.

The system splits into two registers.

• Fixed: the custom wordmark, the Messina family as primary typeface, the hierarchy, the layout grid, a greyscale palette. These carry the weight of credibility, the parts of the identity that show up in a proposal, a case study, a client deck, anywhere we need the work to speak for itself without visual noise competing for attention. The rules are applied consistently across all our material, and their simplicity serves as the skeleton that holds everything together.
• Flexible: the expressive secondary color palette, our “digital surrealism” illustration style, and a set of alternating glyphs that swap into the wordmark and across the system. This is where the personality lives, what lets us look different on social media than we do in a pitch document without ever becoming unrecognisable. These are also the elements most likely to evolve. The glyphs we use to transform the Afternow logo today might not be the ones we use next year. The essence of the brand doesn’t lie in the shapes or colors themselves, but in the fact that they can always change.

The two registers work because the fixed side never bends and the flexible side never breaks the frame. An identity that only had structure would make us rigid within months. One that only had expression would tip us into chaos. Afternow needed both, because the agency runs on the same combination: strategic rigour on one side, creative range on the other.

Lesson 2: Your website redesign is more of a content exercise

In our line of work, a website is where an identity either proves itself or falls apart, because it has to carry the full weight of what we do, beyond how we look. Ours needed to hold five service lines: strategy, brand, website, product and development, each legible on its own while still reading as one connected practice.

The previous site carried its own version of the identity problem. In trying to make sure clients got the fullest picture of us, it piled on subpages, diagrams and explanations until the volume itself started signalling the opposite of confidence. We don’t need to explain everything to be understood, and we don’t need to keep proving our worth on every page.

Fixing that was as much a content exercise as a design one. We went back through the site and separated what actually earned attention on a page, the elements that were engaging and pushed toward an inquiry, from what belonged somewhere else entirely: long form content, pitch decks, onboarding conversations. Giving each its own place gave the site clarity and room to breathe. Clarity reads as confidence, and confidence is what builds trust.

Case studies were another hard part to get right. We work across a lot of client touchpoints on a single engagement, and the temptation is to show everything. Instead, the editorial and layout system does the sorting for us: a fixed structure for how a case study opens and closes, flexible modules for how the work itself gets shown. A brand-only project and a four-product partnership can both live in the same format without either one feeling padded or squeezed.

Lesson 3: Bring your brand system to life

None of this works as a set of static rules. What makes the system feel like a living identity, rather than a style guide people follow loosely, is motion.

The wordmark, the call to action buttons and a handful of graphic elements share a morphing behaviour, so the same shape logic that defines the identity at rest is still present the moment something moves. And every animation on the site follows the same ease in and ease out rules, so pace and rhythm stay consistent whether it’s a hero section loading or a button responding to a hover. It’s a small thing, but it’s the difference between elements that happen to share a page and elements that feel like they’re breathing together.

We also built an echo effect that runs through transitions across our video reel, website navigation and footer: as one visual gives way to the next, a trailing shape holds the connection between them for a beat before it disappears. This subtle detail added the missing element of awe and surprise to pages that otherwise felt stale. 

Motion is often the last thing added to an identity system. For us, it’s what brought the whole system to life.

Lesson 4: Trust your rebranding vision and the team behind it

None of the above happened in one room, or from one discipline. From strategy to execution, it involved almost everyone in the agency at some point. For the areas covered here, Irene Sempere led the strategy work that gave the team its alignment and foundation. Eliana Martinez and I worked the visual identity together, testing how far the fixed and flexible sides could stretch before either one broke. Wesley van’t Hart and Barbora Walia Kratochvil took that system and built it into a website that had to work as hard as it looks. Aleksa Bukvic built the motion language from scratch and made sure it held everything else together. Giannis Koulouris brought all of it to life in code, its own kind of design decision, made under constraints the rest of us don’t always see.

Alongside Filip Justic, I’ve led a lot of the thinking behind this identity, but none of it would hold up without the talented group of people we work with. That’s the part I most wanted this piece to get across. A rebrand this size only works when trust runs in every direction, when strategists trust designers to translate the thinking, when designers trust developers to protect the details, and when everyone trusts the brief enough to push back on it. This one did, and it shows.

About the Author:

Unfold Founder & Creative Director Eddie Lobanovskiy builds high-impact brand identities and UI/UX ecosystems at the intersection of classical design and AI innovation. Designer of the XRP logo.

Here’s a secret nobody tells you about designing for a company the size of Facebook: the actual design part barely changes. You still poke at a problem, sketch some ideas, make something good, get roasted in feedback, and fix it. Same steps whether it’s two people in a garage or twenty thousand people in a skyscraper.

What changes is everything wrapped around the design. That’s the part that turns you into an actual enterprise design agency instead of just a design agency that got lucky once.

At a startup, you talk straight to the founder. They like it, it ships, everyone goes home happy. At a giant company, your one contact answers to a boss, who answers to leadership, who answers to legal, who answers to brand, who answers to a stakeholder nobody has ever met but who somehow still gets a vote. It’s less “get feedback” and more “survive a group chat with forty people in it, three of whom are typing right now and none of whom agree.”

Here’s the welcome package once designing for large companies enters the chat:

• Onboarding that makes airport security look chill: NDAs, background checks, insurance you didn’t know existed
• Procurement approval before you’re even allowed to say hi
• A parade of stakeholders reviewing your work like it’s a jury trial
• Formal presentations where you defend a color choice like it’s a doctoral thesis
• Feedback from five departments that all disagree with each other, sometimes in the same email
• Approval timelines measured in seasons, not days

Some Fortune 500 companies won’t even talk to you until you’re inside their procurement system, and getting in there can take weeks or months. Annoying? Extremely. But once you’re in, you’re in. That approval usually cracks open years of work across the whole company, not just one project.

Here’s what six very different clients taught us about it.

The hard part isn’t the design. It’s getting through the door.

We worked with Facebook on Libra, their crypto initiative. Before we designed a single pixel, we had to clear an onboarding process so strict it felt like joining a secret society, insurance requirements and all. Once we were through the gate, the actual work felt almost quiet by comparison. It’s high-level mobile app thinking, iconography, and some genuinely fun custom illustration with a small team on their side.

You’re not just designing screens. You’re designing for two audiences at once.

Ripple cranked the difficulty up another notch with bigger liability requirements, bigger onboarding lift. But the work matched the ambition: XRP branding, website and digital experiences, marketing collateral, event and stage design, and a lot of big, visionary thinking about where the whole thing was headed.

Projects like this stretch what “design partner” even means. You’re not just handing over files. You’re designing for the end user, sure—but also for your internal contact, who has to walk into a room full of executives who’ve never seen your work and explain why it’s right. Helping them win that argument is half the job.

The fewer people between you and the decision-maker, the faster everything moves.

Rumble was the opposite ride. We joined when they were still small. We had a direct line to the founder, a tight-knit team, and decisions that happened in days instead of quarters. Over time we touched nearly the whole platform: Logo & brand, the main website, mobile apps, TV apps, UX, marketing, basically the entire video-streaming universe.

Watching a company grow up while you’re sitting in the room is a wildly different experience than walking into one that’s already enormous. And it keeps proving the same rule: fewer layers, faster work. Every time.

When things get bigger, they don’t have to get crazy.

We got into Solana early too. We built something we loved but couldn’t have predicted would get this big. Years later, when we came back around, there were naturally more people and more moving parts, but nothing about it felt like starting over.

We’ve since done website work, marketing, iconography, illustration, campaigns, trade-show booths, 3D renders, and pitch decks for them. Basically, anything the crypto ecosystem could throw at us. Good proof that a process can scale up without turning into a completely different beast.

Clear the paperwork once, and every department starts showing up.

Merck sits at the far end of the spectrum from Solana and Rumble. As a massive global pharma company, their vendor onboarding was the kind of thorough that makes you double-check your own paperwork twice. Outside partners have to get formally verified before anyone’s even allowed to say hello.

It’s a real climb. But once we cleared it, the payoff was an ongoing relationship across app and mobile design, custom illustration, 3D graphics, and logo work for internal initiatives and sub-brands. The best part: once you’re a trusted, approved vendor, teams you’ve never met start finding you. The boring part is already handled, and the trust is already banked.

Big brands live on more than one level at a time.

Lamar handed us a broader brand challenge. We evolved their logo, visual identity, and brand guidelines, rebuilt their website and the whole experience around discovering and booking billboard ads, and worked on marketing and billboard creative promoting Lamar itself.

The fun puzzle here was juggling three versions of the same brand at once: the corporate identity, the digital customer experience, and physical billboards you drive past on the highway.

A few more things worth knowing.

Your contact usually isn’t the final decision-maker. A startup founder can approve something in one meeting. At a big company, someone you’ve never even met might have veto power, and you won’t find out until round four.

Contradictory feedback doesn’t mean doing everything literally. With enough stakeholders, comments will clash with each other. Your job is to find the actual worry hiding underneath the comment and fix that, not rubber-stamp every note like a Xerox machine.

One clear project owner changes everything. Twenty stakeholders is fine. Twenty stakeholders who all think they’re the decision-maker is how projects quietly die.

So what does it actually take to be an enterprise design agency?

Here’s the big misconception: that designing for a massive company needs a totally different creative process. It doesn’t. The fundamentals hold up exactly the same whether you’re two people in a garage or a Fortune 500 name with its own zip code. The actual skill is learning to navigate everything around the design: the people, the process, the permission slips.

Trust compounds. Good work matters, obviously. But so does being reliable, easy to reach, and easy to work with. Earn that trust once, and one project quietly turns into years of work across industries.

About the Author:

Zlatina Petrova has spent 13 years shaping brands and digital products across Silicon Valley and Europe. As Founder and Design Director of Brandly, she works with tech startups, VCs, global brands and government institutions including work on Bulgaria’s national design system. Her work sits between branding, product design and UX/UI, with a belief that design should do more than look good: it should help businesses grow, products work better and brands mean something to people.

A few years ago, Forbes profiled Brandly. We started as a handful of home-based freelancer designers; now, we’re building B2B brand strategy at a national level for companies from Series A onward. The editor asked me whether I’d known Brandly would become what it is today. I said, “Yes. It was inevitable.” But it didn’t always feel that way.

An inevitable brand represents an idea whose time has come and spreads like wildfire. And the thing about inevitable brands is that they seem obvious in retrospect.

There was a time when we were just five people working from home, hunched over our computers. We were trying and trying to create Brandly. But at some point, after so many experiments, the brand took on a life of its own. 

Just like great art, great brands come alive and begin to tell their creators how to bring them into existence. Michelangelo saw David in a five-meter block of marble. He didn’t create David; he set him free. David was already there. 

A great brand works the same way: it is discovered, revealed, and not simply created.

But to discover it, we have to see past the beliefs and behaviors that get in the way. It’s a little like parenting: we don’t try to control our children and tell them exactly which career path to choose. We help them discover who they are.

Brands need the same space to reveal themselves.

Over the past seven years, building brands across industries and countries, we’ve learned that creating an inevitable brand often means stepping back before adding more.

Here are five ways to build an inevitable brand.

1. Uncover your corporate identity and brand truth

Asking your customers who your brand should be is like asking strangers who you should become. Your brand’s truth doesn’t come from there. And it doesn’t come from an agency either. Going to an agency and asking them who you should be is like going to a therapist and asking them to present three different versions of the person you could become.

A good therapist guides you through the process of discovering the answer on your own. A good branding partner should do the same. Your brand’s truth and essence come from within: the founder’s vision, the reason the company exists, and the change it wants to create.

The job of corporate identity development is to uncover that truth, articulate it, and make it recognizable to your audience. 

Level 1: Functional brands

This is where most brands live (and die). They compete on functional benefits, usually marginal differences such as “faster,” “cheaper,” “better,” or “a one-stop shop.” The problem is that there is so much competition at this level that brands experience constant downward pressure. If your primary advantage is being cheaper or faster, someone else can eventually become cheaper or faster than you. 

Level 2: Experiential brands

Experiential brands still deliver functional benefits, but they add another layer: the experience of using the product or the service.

On a functional level, Ryanair sells you a plane ticket. It gets you from point A to point B. But have you ever been on a Ryanair flight? Let’s be honest, the experience isn’t the main reason you bought the ticket in the first place. 

On the other hand, Virgin takes a different approach. You watch a movie, enjoy the service, and experience the personality of the brand throughout the journey. That is the difference between functional and experiential branding.

Level 3: Transformational brands

This is where iconic brands live. Transformational brands don’t just sell products or experiences. They create new human beings.

Before Nike, people jogged on the street. Nike helped make it aspirational to become a “weekend warrior.” This is someone who sees themselves as an athlete even if they aren’t a professional one.

Before Apple, if you showed up to work wearing a hoodie or a t-shirt you’d get fired. Apple created that generation of entrepreneurs, the disrupters.

Pro tip: Discover which level your brand belongs to.

We think about branding across three levels. Understanding which one fits your vision can help you see what kind of brand you are actually building.

2. Build memory through emotional brand positioning, not just visual identity

This is probably one of the most challenging ideas for founders. If you want to build an inevitable brand, you need to understand that becoming unforgettable starts with becoming memorable. And memory can be built in two ways: repetition and emotion.

Repetition is the traditional way of building memory. You repeat a message over and over until your audience starts repeating it too. The problem is that repetition is expensive. 

A more powerful and most cost-efficient way of doing this is to create emotion. Emotion creates memory on a deeper level.

Memory attached to emotion is a survival mechanism. It’s the same reason you never forget the food that made you sick. 

Brands can use the same principle: the extent to which you can consistently evoke that emotion is the extent to which your brand will be remembered.

We call this brand frequency, a crucial element of emotional brand positioning. 

How do you discover your brand frequency?

Start by identifying the peak experience of your brand, which is the emotional high point of the product experience. 

When developing a B2B brand strategy for Nexa, a client of ours that is revolutionizing the workforce by introducing robots and AI agents into everyday business processes, the peak experience is the moment a founder opens their phone and sees that the work has been done without micromanaging anyone or even being at the office. The emotion is freedom and relief.

Now take an iconic brand like Airbnb. The peak experience is the moment you’re invited to sit at your host’s table, break bread, and share a meal. You may be in a foreign country, but somehow, you feel like you belong.

That is the art of branding: delivering the emotion before the customer even experiences the product.

Takeaway: The majority of communication between humans is non-verbal. That’s why what your brand emotes is more important than what your brand says to its audience.

3. Define your brand promise and positioning

Another important step in building an inevitable brand is identifying your brand promise. It’s what you solve for your customer at a functional level better than anyone else.

This is what your brand says. Your brand frequency is what it emotes.

Brand promises are usually simple: “faster,” “simpler,” “cheaper,” and “easier.” But there is an important difference between a brand promise and a slogan.

A brand promise describes what the brand does. A slogan emotes what the brand does.

Think about slogans as pieces of poetry. They inspire, they emote, and they are the outcome of your brand’s frequency.  

This is why blindly asking AI to give you 20 slogans becomes irrelevant. AI can be an excellent assistant in the brainstorming process. It can challenge directions, generate variations, organize thinking, and help you explore language faster.

But it should not be in charge of your decision as a brand leader. If the underlying emotion isn’t clear, generating another 100 slogans won’t reveal it. Human work comes first: discovering the truth. AI can then help you articulate it. 

For Nexa, the brand promise is to simplify business operations by solving workforce limitations.

The slogan we created for them is: Beyond human scale. 

It carries the idea that technology isn’t separate from people. It is an extension of human capability that allows us to operate beyond our natural limitations. And the beautiful part about it? It also sounds great in other languages. 

Takeaway: Brand promise is cognitive. Slogan is emotional.

4. Develop a cohesive visual identity system

Once you understand the core elements of your brand universe, it’s time to translate them into a consistent visual identity system.

This is where many brands lose their way. They rediscover a new version of themselves with every presentation, campaign, landing page, social post, and product release. 

But an inevitable brand should feel consistent everywhere. To help our clients find their way, we use a simple, yet effective technique called “the brand map.” The matrix helps us understand consumer perception by showing where a brand sits across two dimensions: price perception and identity. This becomes a blueprint for the brand’s visual language because design delivers emotion before a customer ever buys the product. 

Once you know where your brand sits, decisions about typography, color, imagery, composition, and art direction become less subjective. Instead of asking, “Do we like this font?” you can ask, “Does this font communicate the perception we have chosen?”

The matrix has two axes: Affordable-Expensive and Traditional-Modern. 

Expensive + Traditional

Serif typography, deep and muted color palettes, and moody photography that highlights craftsmanship, heritage, and texture.

Expensive + Modern

An ultra-minimalist, futuristic aesthetic. A lot of white space, clean geometric sans-serif fonts, highly restricted color palettes, often monochromatic with sharp metallic accents and abstract or conceptual imagery.

Affordable + Traditional

A familiar, warm, and inviting visual language. Friendly fonts, approachable earthy or primary tones, and authentic, human-centric photography focused on everyday people and real-life moments.

Affordable + Modern

A high-energy, vibrant, digital-first visual language. Bold layouts, bright color accents, high contrast, clean neo-grotesque typography, and dynamic imagery designed for a screen-first generation.

5. How to hire a branding agency and direct your team

You know the saying: “If you want something done right, do it yourself.”

Brand building is one of the places where we would challenge that idea.

You shouldn’t design every asset yourself. But you also shouldn’t completely outsource the responsibility for your brand either. You need to play many roles and take each of them seriously. 

Hire

When looking to hire a branding agency or freelance designer, look for a branding partner who is great at creating a mood. They understand how visual decisions affect the nervous system of the viewer and can translate your emotional brand positioning into typography, color, imagery, composition, and movement. 

One way to test this when evaluating outsourced brand design is to ask the designer to create a mood board based on your brand emotion. Then show it to several people. Don’t ask them, “Do you like it?” Ask them: “How does this make you feel?” If the mood board consistently evokes your brand emotion, you may have found the right design partner.

Direct

Once you find the right partner, your second role as a brand leader is to direct.

Ask the designer to deconstruct, distill, complement, and document each part of the visual system:

• Colors
• Typography
• Logo
• Iconography
• Photography
• Motion
• Layout principles

These elements form the foundation of your style guide. We also strongly recommend adding real brand applications and mockups across every customer touchpoint: website, social media, video, graphic design, UX, UI, presentations, sales materials, and anything else your team uses regularly.

Identify which assets are most critical and build those first.

Evangelize

The final role is often forgotten. A style guide sitting in a folder doesn’t create consistency. People do. Once the system exists, someone has to protect it, explain it, teach it, and make sure the team understands not only what the rules are, but why they exist.

That is what turns a visual identity into a living brand. And it brings us back to where we started. An inevitable brand is not something you manufacture in Figma. You discover its truth. You identify the emotion behind it. You articulate its promise. You translate it into a recognizable system. And then you protect that system without suffocating it.

The goal of any successful B2B brand strategy isn’t to control every expression of the brand. It is to understand the brand deeply enough to let it reveal itself. And eventually, the right decisions start to feel obvious. Almost inevitable.

About the Author: 

Paul Lilley, Ulysses Founder / Creative Director, cut his teeth in London and Melbourne working for creative and art agencies including Vice, Cornerstone, and Next Wave. His collaborations with international clients on large scale campaigns gave him deep grounding in strategy, positioning and brand identity design, which he now brings directly to food and beverage founders building their brands.

To be a restaurant owner in the foodie borough that is Brooklyn, NY, you should be ready to compete not just on the quality of your food, but also on experience, atmosphere, service, social media, and branding. Ultimately, these touchpoints decide whether somebody remembers your restaurant when they’re deciding where to go on Friday night.

That was the challenge we faced when we were approached to create the brand for Lucky Parlor, a new gyoza and cocktail bar in Brooklyn.

The owner, Tatsumi, found us through Dribbble. 

He’d seen our profile and examples of how we’d helped other food and beverage businesses build distinctive brands in similarly crowded markets, and our approach resonated with what he wanted to create.

This wasn’t Tatsumi’s first restaurant. The team already operated two Japanese food concepts in Brooklyn and had built a local reputation around high-quality, more traditional Japanese sushi and udon. But this time they wanted to push the boat out a little further.

Lucky Parlor wasn’t supposed to be just another place to eat gyoza. The vision was a neighborhood hangout: somewhere you could drop into any night of the week with friends, family, or by yourself. The menu would combine creative, small-plate Japanese food with equally interesting contemporary cocktails, all served in an environment that felt relaxed but still elevated.

Our job was to make the brand feel as interesting as the concept. We didn’t need to create another nice-looking restaurant. We needed to make it unmistakably Lucky Parlor.

Building a brand before a logo.

The initial request was branding. And from the get-go, we knew it wasn’t just a logo. This is an important distinction because one of the biggest mistakes I see businesses—and sometimes designers—make is treating the logo as the brand.

A logo is an identifier. It’s one piece of a much larger system. Lucky Parlor needed a flexible brand capable of growing with the business.

Our scope began with brand strategy, followed by the identity: logo, typography, color, illustration, brand assets, collateral, and a website as the brand’s digital home. Our pitch was simple: don’t invest in a logo; invest in a brand that’s built to scale.

A restaurant needs to show up in dozens of places: menus, signage, packaging, social media, merchandise, events, digital touchpoints, and applications nobody can predict on day one. If the entire identity depends on putting the logo in the corner, you haven’t really built a brand system. You’ve built a logo and a collection of layouts.

We wanted to give Lucky Parlor a recognizable visual language its audience could connect with across all of those touchpoints. The test for us was simple: if you removed the logo, would somebody still recognize the brand?

Letting strategy drive every design decision.

Before we drew anything, we defined what Lucky Parlor needed to become. Our project goal was to position it as a friendly and innovative gyoza bar serving some of the best Japanese food and contemporary cocktails in the game.

The concept sat somewhere between a gyoza bar, a cocktail bar, and a tapas-style dining experience. The owners wanted to create a place that brought people together around a shared love of handcrafted gyoza, creative small plates, and modern interpretations of familiar cocktails.

That gave us some useful tensions to work with: friendly, but elevated. Playful, but premium. Creative, but not chaotic. Innovative, but still accessible.

Those tensions became much more useful than a collection of visual references.

This is why I believe strategy should come before aesthetics. Strategy doesn’t restrict creativity; it gives creativity a problem worth solving. Without strategy, the conversation becomes, “Do we like this font?” With strategy, it becomes, “Does this font help us feel playful but premium?”

That’s a much better conversation.

The same applies to every design decision. Instead of asking whether something simply looks cool, we can ask whether it moves the brand closer to the position we’re trying to own. Our filter throughout the project became incredibly simple: Does this feel like Lucky Parlor?

Exploring the right amount of spice.

Once the strategy was established, we moved into creative exploration. Our approach is highly collaborative. We don’t believe the best way to get to a strong solution is to disappear for a few weeks, come back with one polished direction, and announce, “Here it is.”

Instead, we explore a spectrum. Internally, we call it mild, medium, and spicy.

Mild gives the client a relatively safe interpretation of the strategy. Medium pushes things further. Spicy asks what happens if we really lean into the personality and see how far the idea can go. Importantly, these aren’t three random logos. They’re three interpretations of the same strategic foundation.

For Lucky Parlor, our first direction was more minimal and hand-drawn, taking inspiration from the visual character of a Japanese postcard. It was charming and considered, but deliberately restrained.

The second direction became bolder. We explored bold typography with a drop shadow, inspired by vintage signwriting and old Brooklyn storefronts. It had more physical presence and brought some of the neighborhood energy into the identity.

The third pushed the personality furthest. We explored playful, nostalgic-inspired lettering and reinterpreted it through a contemporary lens. It felt friendly, energetic, and recognizable without losing the elevated quality we wanted. That became the foundation for the final identity.

But presenting the work wasn’t a matter of, “Here are three options. Pick one.” A client might respond to the energy of one direction, the typography of another, or a detail from the third. Our job is to understand why they’re responding to those things and use that information to refine the brand.

We’re not asking the client to become the designer. We’re using their reactions as data.

Creating a world around one gyoza mark.

The centerpiece of the identity became a simple gyoza brand mark. Rather than plastering it over everything, it became a recurring shape and visual device throughout the system. It could function as a recognizable mark, a frame, a graphic device, or a small detail that tied an application back to the wider brand.

That repetition matters. A distinctive brand isn’t created by inventing something new every time you design an application. It’s created by identifying a small number of recognizable ingredients and using them consistently enough that people start associating those ingredients with you.

We paired the core identity with an extended palette of vibrant but slightly muted colors, while black became a consistent grounding element. It allowed the identity to be colorful without becoming childish and playful without losing its premium edge.

Another major part of the system was illustration. We created a suite of hand-drawn illustrations covering everything from gyoza and cocktails to illustrations inspired by the founder’s daughters. The style was deliberately naive, loose, and imperfect.

Those subtle imperfections were important. In branding, perfection isn’t always the answer. Sometimes making everything perfectly geometric, perfectly aligned, and perfectly consistent strips out the thing people would have connected with.

The hand-drawn quality gave Lucky Parlor warmth and provided another ownable ingredient that could stretch across collateral, merchandise, digital applications, and future communications.

This is something we prioritize in our work. Custom typography, illustration, lettering, textures, and graphic devices add a human touch that creates a brand capable of standing out in a crowded market.

Designing for what we couldn’t predict.

The brand will eventually appear somewhere you didn’t anticipate. Somebody will need a poster tomorrow. A new menu will launch. There will be merchandise, an event, a collaboration, a social post, a new location, or some other application that wasn’t in the original scope.

You can’t design all of those things in advance. What you can design is a system capable of handling them.

For Lucky Parlor, the gyoza mark, typography, color palette, illustrations, textures, and graphic language became a box of ingredients. Those ingredients could be combined differently depending on the application without losing the thread of the brand.

This is where I think designers need to rethink what consistency means. Consistency doesn’t mean making everything look the same. It means making everything feel like it came from the same place.

If every piece of communication is identical, the brand becomes boring. If every piece is completely different, the brand becomes forgettable. The opportunity lives somewhere in the middle.

When we’re building identities, I’m interested in creating what I think of as memory hooks: a small number of distinctive elements customers can begin associating with the business. For Lucky Parlor, the gyoza mark is one. The lettering is another. The illustration style, color palette, and overall playfulness create others.

Individually, none of those elements has to carry the entire identity. Together, they create recognition. The first time someone sees the brand, they notice it. The next time, it feels familiar. Eventually, they recognize Lucky Parlor before they’ve consciously processed the name.

That’s when design starts becoming brand equity.

Giving Lucky Parlor a sense of self.

Lucky Parlor was a business concept with a clear vision but without a visual identity capable of expressing it. Afterward, it had a sense of self.

The brand became friendly, recognizable, playful, and distinctive. More importantly, the founders had a visual system they could continue using as the restaurant grew.

That, to me, is the real deliverable of a branding project. Yes, we delivered logos, typography, colors, illustrations, collateral, and all of the tangible assets you’d expect. But the more important result was clarity. The business knew how it should show up, what it should feel like, and had the tools to communicate that consistently.

We didn’t just create another gyoza restaurant. We created Lucky Parlor.

That’s the difference I want branding to make.

Giving people a reason to remember.

My biggest advice to designers and agencies hoping to win projects like Lucky Parlor is to stop leading with deliverables. 

Clients can find thousands of people capable of designing a nice logo. What they have a much harder time finding is somebody who can understand why their business is struggling to differentiate itself and translate that problem into a brand people remember.

Ask them the following:

• Who they’re competing against
• What customers should remember about them
• What conventions dominate their category
• Where they want to fit in and where they deliberately want to break away
• What they want people saying about the business when they’re not in the room

Then design.

And when you present the work, don’t just explain what you made. Explain why. “We used hand-drawn illustrations because they look cool” is an aesthetic explanation. “We used hand-drawn illustrations because the imperfection gives the brand the warmth and approachability required by the positioning” is a strategic explanation.

Same illustration. Very different conversation. The first positions you as someone who makes things look good. The second positions you as someone who can solve business problems through design.

Lastly, for brands facing the same challenge as Lucky Parlor, I’d pay close attention to the questions designers and agencies ask before they talk about aesthetics. 

A good branding partner should want to understand your business, audience, competitive environment, personality, ambitions, and the space you can realistically own.

They should also be willing to push you. The objective isn’t to hire somebody who agrees with everything you say. It’s to find someone who can take what you know about your business, combine it with an outsider perspective, and identify opportunities you might not see from inside the company.

Because ultimately, branding isn’t about having the prettiest logo in your category. 

It’s about giving people a reason to notice you, a reason to remember you, and a reason to choose you.

And in a crowded market, that might be the most valuable thing a brand can own.

If you resonate with this article or would like to hear what Ulysses Design Co can do for your brand, you can drop me a line here.

About the Author:
Diana Hlevnjak brings over 20 years of experience in graphic design, branding, and illustration. Her Master’s degree in Fine Arts continues to inform her approach to visual communication, blending artistic exploration with practical design thinking. Her work spans branding, packaging, game design, and illustration, always centered on building cohesive, thoughtful visual systems across digital and print media.

One of the most frustrating things about being a designer is realizing that some of your best work is the work you cannot show.

I’ve been in that position more than once.

You can spend months working on a brand identity, solving problems, refining details, and collaborating with clients and other teams to make something that you are genuinely proud of. You know how much thought went into it. You know how many decisions were made along the way.

And then the project launches, and you can’t share it.

Sometimes, all you have is a folder sitting on your computer that contains work you know is some of your strongest.

For designers who have been working professionally for many years, this becomes a familiar problem. The more established you become, the more likely you are to encounter confidentiality agreements, private projects, unreleased products, or work that simply isn’t yours to make public.

For a long time, I thought of this as a disadvantage.

Eventually, I started looking at it differently.

Your portfolio doesn’t have to be a complete archive of everything you’ve ever created. It needs to communicate how you think, what you’re capable of, and the kind of work you want to do.

1. Rethink what your portfolio is for.

You see another designer posting a beautiful client project and think, I have work like that too, I just can’t show it.

But I’ve learned that comparing portfolios this way isn’t particularly useful.

What you see on someone’s portfolio is not necessarily the full picture of their career. It is the small percentage of their work that they are able and willing to publish.

That’s an important distinction.

A portfolio is a curated representation of your experience, skills, taste, and direction. It doesn’t need to contain every project you’ve ever worked on.

In fact, it shouldn’t.

2. Make self-initiated work a part of your practice.

My earlier school years in graphic design had an even bigger influence on the way I approach design than I realized at the time.

A lot of our assignments were essentially fabricated client projects.

We would receive a conceptual brief and treat it as if a real client had walked through the door. I remember working on things like branding for a fictional hotel chain that needed to feel connected as one brand while still having its own character and appeal for different destinations and audiences.

There was no real client behind the brief. No real company. No budget or business waiting for us to deliver.

But we still had to make the idea work.

We had to think about the audience, the story, the visual identity, and how everything would come together as a complete concept.

Looking back, some of those projects were probably pretty ambitious for a teenager. But I remember how much fun they were. There was something exciting about being given a problem and having complete freedom to decide where it could go.

That experience stayed with me.

I remember one of my professors telling us that he didn’t feel right if he went a whole week without drawing or designing something. He constantly needed to doodle, explore an idea, or make something new.

I didn’t think much of it. But the older I get, the more I understand exactly what he meant.

I have that same need to create.

As a freelancer, there are naturally periods when I don’t have a client project to work on. I could simply take that time off, but quite often I find myself opening Illustrator and starting something anyway.

A brand idea. An illustration. A packaging concept. A logo that has been sitting in my head.

Not because someone asked me to make it.

Not even necessarily because I need another project for my portfolio.

I just feel the need to make something.

Self-initiated projects have remained such an important part of my practice.They aren’t simply a way to fill gaps in my portfolio. For me, they are part of being a designer.

3. Give your concept work the same rigor as client work.

Conceptual work gives me the freedom to explore ideas that I may not have had the opportunity to explore in client work. I can experiment with a visual language, build a more complete identity, or explore a particular industry simply because I find it interesting.

The important thing is to treat the project seriously.

Don’t create a logo and stop there.

Build a brand.

Give it a reason to exist. Develop the typography, colour palette, visual language, applications, and story. Think about how it would actually behave in the real world.

When you do that, the project stops feeling like a random design exercise and starts becoming a demonstration of your capabilities.

The goal isn’t to prove that you spent a lot of time on the project.

It’s to show that there was thought behind the work.

4. Create the kind of work you want to be hired for.

This is probably one of the most useful things about having the freedom to create conceptual projects.

You get to decide what you want your portfolio to say about you.

If you want to work with premium food brands, you can create packaging projects that demonstrate that direction.

If you want to attract lifestyle or fashion clients, you can build identities that feel at home in those industries.

If illustration is an important part of your practice, you can create a brand where illustration isn’t just an extra element but an essential part of the identity.

I’ve found that this is especially useful when the work you have done professionally doesn’t fully represent the direction you want to take next.

Your portfolio doesn’t only have to document your past.

It can help shape your future.

5. Don’t underestimate the work you can’t show.

Just because a project isn’t in your portfolio doesn’t mean the experience you gained from it doesn’t count.

The years spent solving problems, presenting ideas, working with clients, handling feedback, making compromises, defending creative decisions, and figuring out what actually works—all of that stays with you.

A portfolio can’t show all of it. And maybe it shouldn’t have to.

Sometimes I look at my portfolio and know that some of the projects I’m most proud of aren’t there. But that doesn’t make those projects any less important to my career.

They influenced how I work today.

They made me better at solving problems.

They taught me things that eventually found their way into other projects.

And in a way, that is the point.

Your portfolio is not proof of everything you’ve done. It’s a window into what you can do.

So if some of your strongest work is hidden behind an NDA, don’t let that stop you from building a portfolio you’re proud of.

Show what you can.

Create what you can’t show.

Explain how you think.

And use your portfolio not only to document where you’ve been, but to communicate where you’re going next.

DesWave Principal Consultant Boris Sage uncovers why craft alone loses pitches, the exact proposal elements driving client conversions, and how selling risk reduction over portfolios is the key to landing high-value web and app projects.