Role:
Marketing Design Team Lead
Scope:
Brand Strategy, Visual Systems, Digital Experience, Integrated Campaigns, Creative Leadership
PandaDoc is a B2B SaaS platform that helps businesses create, manage, and automate documents, making sales processes simpler and more efficient.
As a Lead Marketing Designer, I worked across brand and marketing design, leading creative projects, supporting the design team, and collaborating with different marketing teams.
My work covered everything from visual guidelines and paid campaigns to motion, product launches, and brand storytelling. It gave me the opportunity to work on both the bigger creative picture and the small details that bring ideas to life.
Brand Evolution · Art Direction · Integrated Marketing
The Challenge
How do you evolve an established brand without losing what makes it recognizable?
The challenge went beyond visual consistency. It was about defining distinctive brand attributes, standing out from competitors, understanding different audiences, and building a clear communication approach across every touchpoint.
This meant finding the right balance between:
Brand Recognition vs. Creative Fatigue
How do we maintain a recognizable brand without repeating the same visual ideas or becoming predictable?Brand Consistency vs. Channel Relevance
How do we create a unified brand experience while adapting to different audiences, platforms, and communication contexts?Creative Quality vs. Production Scale
How do we maintain high creative standards while supporting more campaigns, formats, and teams — without slowing down production?Brand Guidelines vs. Creative Freedom
Solution
My approach started with the bigger picture: understanding the brand, its audience, and how it was experienced across different touchpoints.
Through regular brand audits, competitor research, and visual analysis, I identified inconsistencies, evaluated what was working, and explored opportunities for the brand to evolve.
These insights informed a clearer brand direction, defining how PandaDoc should look, feel, and communicate. I translated that direction into practical design guidelines, reusable components, templates, and channel-specific visual principles.
The goal wasn't to create rigid rules. It was to build a recognizable foundation that helped designers make confident decisions, work more efficiently, and still have the freedom to experiment.
I also developed self-service tools that enabled other marketing teams to create consistent, on-brand materials independently, reducing repetitive requests and making the system easier to scale.
These insights informed a clearer brand direction, defining how PandaDoc should look, feel, and communicate. I translated that direction into practical design guidelines, reusable components, templates, and channel-specific visual principles.
The goal wasn't to create rigid rules. It was to build a recognizable foundation that helped designers make confident decisions, work more efficiently, and still have the freedom to experiment.
I also developed self-service tools that enabled other marketing teams to create consistent, on-brand materials independently, reducing repetitive requests and making the system easier to scale.
Website Experience
The website needed to communicate a complex product clearly while making the brand feel approachable and human.
I focused on balancing product-focused storytelling with authentic photography, expressive compositions, and clear information hierarchy.
Product interfaces helped explain functionality and value, while human imagery added context and emotion. Together, they created a more relatable way to communicate what PandaDoc does and who it helps.
Paid Advertising
Performance creative required a balance between recognizable branding, creative experimentation, and measurable results.
I developed the Paid Creative Playbook, a practical framework covering visual principles, layout systems, messaging hierarchy, and channel-specific recommendations.
Alongside it, I created the Learning Wall — a shared space for turning campaign performance into actionable creative insights.
Each quarter, I reviewed creative performance, analyzed A/B testing results, and benchmarked competitor advertising. These findings helped identify what resonated with audiences, generate new hypotheses, and inform the next round of creative development.
The process created a continuous learning loop:
Analyze → Identify Insights → Build Hypotheses → Test → Learn → Improve
With 30+ creative assets and approximately 10 A/B tests per quarter, the goal was to make creative decisions more intentional, evidence-based, and scalable.
The framework also helped reduce average design review cycles from 3–4 to 2 rounds and banner production time from 3–4 to 2–3 days.
Social Media
Social media needed a recognizable brand presence without becoming overly structured or predictable.
I established a flexible visual foundation that kept PandaDoc consistent while giving designers freedom to experiment with formats, trends, humor, and platform-specific content.
The system made it easier to react quickly to relevant conversations, adapt memes and cultural moments, and connect them to situations our customers could recognize.
The goal was to create content that felt native to each platform while remaining unmistakably PandaDoc — balancing brand recognition with personality, relevance, and creative spontaneity.
Marketing Materials
From eBooks and reports to product guides and sales enablement assets, marketing materials needed to communicate complex information clearly while maintaining a consistent brand experience.
I developed scalable templates, modular layouts, and visual guidelines that supported different content formats and levels of complexity.
Out-of-Home Campaigns
PandaDoc typically runs 3–4 OOH campaigns per year, each adapted to different audiences, locations, and formats. Here’s one example of my approach.
For the “Do Less. Sell More.” highway campaign, the challenge was to communicate PandaDoc’s value to drivers in just a few seconds. I developed a scalable creative framework using bold typography, minimal visuals, and a clear messaging hierarchy to make the campaign instantly recognizable and easy to understand.
Brand Lift Results
A separate PandaDoc airport OOH campaign delivered:
+65.1% relative brand awareness lift — approximately 11× the technology benchmark.
+9.85% relative brand consideration lift — approximately 60% above the benchmark.
A Brand Is Never Finished
Brands evolve as audiences, technologies, and the world around them change. A designer's role is to recognize these shifts, challenge what no longer works, and find new ways to keep the brand relevant and distinctive.
The goal isn't to reinvent the brand every time, but to evolve it intentionally — preserving what makes it recognizable while creating space for new ideas, experimentation, and growth.
