YouGov

I joined a brand that already existed and a backlog that wouldn't stop. The interesting work wasn't any single asset, it was building the systems that let all of it stay coherent and ship fast.

/Scope: Editorial Design | Layout Design | Design systems | Template and Component Design | Data Visualization | Information Design | Motion

Every format a research company runs on - whitepapers, reports, infographics, executive decks, social, motion, print. As the senior designer, I did two things at once: produced the work, and built the systems that let the rest of the team produce it. Over my time there, output roughly tripled as the requests piled up, not because we worked faster, but because the systems made the on-brand version the default one.

And I spent a good part of it mentoring the designers who joined, getting their work to the standard the brand needed without someone checking every file.

Most of what YouGov needed was dense - research, data, long-form argument. The hard part isn't making it pretty. It's making something heavy feel navigable.

The brief was usually the same shape: too much information, not enough room, and it had to read as effortless. So I designed the structure first, a grid and baseline the densest page could sit on without feeling crowded, and a small set of repeating components so every report felt related without me redrawing them each time. The grid is doing the work the reader never notices. That was the point.

A research brand lives or dies on whether people understand its data. A lot of my work was turning numbers that meant something to an analyst into something that meant something to everyone else.

This usually started with a table nobody wanted to read. The design question isn't "which chart" — it's "what's the one thing this data is actually saying," then building everything else to get out of its way. I treated the visualization as an argument, not decoration: decide the takeaway, make it the loudest thing on the page, let the supporting numbers stay quiet.

The decks were never just for me to use. They had to work in the hands of people across the business who needed something on-brand by a meeting they were already late for.

A good template isn't a nice slide — it's a system that makes the on-brand version the easy version. I built one master with fixed structure underneath and a set of layouts on top, so the choices that could break the brand simply weren't available, and the choice that was left was already correct. The skill wasn't the slide. It was deciding how much someone could be trusted not to decide.