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UL is a safety science and compliance management company with a global network of laboratories that test consumer and industrial products to regulatory standards, as well as providing software simulation and modelling services.
You can find their mark on products ranging from the lithium-ion battery inside of your smartphone, all the way to your toaster.
I served as the design leader for the growth and business marketing organization, responsible for 8 business units with 34 individual clients. I supervised a remote team of 7 direct reports alongside my editorial counterpart with team of 4, and managed the support of 2 external design agencies.
Together we produced marketing initiatives including video content, event collateral, whitepapers, infosheets, and social media, in support of $1.14 billion in annual revenue.
When faced with a resource shortage that impacted timelines and violated SLAs, I built a dashboard that took the revenue share of individual business units and divided it by the aggregated creative hours billed to each respective unit. This produced a ratio that provided leadership high level understanding as to which business units were consuming an outsized percentage of resources compared to their revenue stream. With this knowledge we were able to make a a case for reducing the creative support for underperforming business units and reallocate resources to profit-leaders, renegotiate timelines, and ease the volume of work on an over-tasked creative group.
I introduced the group to Adobe CC libraries and built out robust collections of brand basics like logos and colors, specific-use photography and vector graphics, headline and copy copy treatments, icon sets, and video storyboarding motion frames. I was able to ease the burden of the creative group from having to search a disparate and unorganized intranet.
Though, I did go in and organize that intranet too. I created a new SharePoint group page and folder where I consolidated all creative assets in a central well-organized location. I also created a sub-page for each business unit with information like the assigned designer, their time zone, pre-approved assets, and the different points of contact for that unit.
UL Solutions opened a new downtown Chicago office in 2024 and we made a point of going full-steam-ahead with fresh branding. Full bleed wall graphics, posters, wayfinding, reception videos, and material selection like acrylic and slotted wood for deeper accents. We also worked on paint swatches and furniture selection.
UL Solutions opened a new Lowell Arkansas center of excellence in 2023 dedicated to testing retail and consumer products for customers like Walmart. The Lowell lab served as a template to refresh a number of labs across the globe; wall graphics, posters, wayfinding, but also event graphics and video production to capture the grand opening.
I supervised the production of video content for brand education, lab openings, government regulations, special events, interviews, and software demonstrations. Designers collaborated with script writers to build storyboards from original video footage captured by our in-house video team, stock footage, stock music, and a library of motion graphic templates and transitions developed with my guidance. Our storyboards were delivered to the video team for production, capture, and editing, then reviewed by our team for quality assurance.
I was able to reduce stress on the design group by replacing a day-of-production document built in InDesign and delivered as a 16:9 PDF presentation with an editable Word Doc template that project management would be able to update without design assistance. With this change were were able to reduce designers time on this non-design task from 6 hours per request to 0.
To push the creative envelope with the design and video teams I spearheaded a requested internship recruitment campaign. I referenced fast-paced video transition templates, energizing modern music selections (compared to generic corporate soundtracks), and a vertical format intended for self-publishing on TikTok. All of these components together helped provide a fun youthful vibe to an otherwise traditional corporate recruiting campaign.
A nine-month long process (a little on the nose) to develop new templates for interactive whitepapers, infosheets, technical reports, case studies, and brochures, complimented by print versions of the same, and social media templates for self-service use. With these new templates we enabled the design team to work in an expedient manner to move our brand refresh forward. A collaboration between senior leadership, agency partners, colleagues, and individual contributors.
I served as the lead in developing new illustration guidelines for the enterprise. I assigned three designers to create separate design systems for specific use-cases that would cover a broad slate of requests. We took great consideration into developing illustrations that a designer of any level would be able to execute on. Comprehensive guidelines were approved and consolidated into the master brand, of which a small example is available below.
ULS is big on corporate events and B2B tradeshows. To streamline production we created, you guessed it, templates! We referred to the project as "booth-in-a-box." This provided a service menu for any requester to choose which design language they would like to use for any one event. This also enabled the designers to iterate on previous designs knowing that it will still fall within vendor specifications.
We scheduled, coordinated, and art directed, a 2-day campus photoshoot covering 17 separate laboratories. This included a 5 member crew, 21 scientific staff, and 3 leadership positions. We produced ~3,400 selects of in-house imagery to support brand and marketing initiatives.
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