NN (A.K.A NICOLAS NAVARRETE)

Scilife had gone through a rebrand with an external agency. The output was a PDF with color palette, typography, and application examples designed almost entirely for print. The company runs on inbound: weekly output includes 10 LinkedIn carousels with up to 10 slides each, infographics, newsletters, and web pages. They needed a designer to "move faster". The system I inherited wasn't built for that volume or those formats.

The brand book had aesthetic direction but didn't cover the formats Scilife used every day. There was no criteria for infographics, carousels, or presentations. The colors didn't generate enough contrast for digital pieces. And the assets that volume of production required simply didn't exist. Without them, every new piece required interpreting a system designed for a different context. The result was inconsistency, but not the obvious kind. Everyone knew something wasn't working. Nobody could point to exactly what.

The first thing I did was map what existed and what was missing for digital. The system had been in use for a year, but digital pieces were inheriting the print language without adapting it: no safe zones for LinkedIn, no typographic hierarchies to guide focus in the minimal time a user gives a piece, no criteria for the formats used every day. As I started designing, I began to understand which parts of the system worked and which had no answer for those formats.

The first decision I made was about images. The system relied heavily on stock photography. The problem wasn't aesthetic, it was about representation: the photos were generic and had nothing to do with the actual work of Scilife's users, who operate in regulated industries like pharma and medical devices. I proposed cutting them back. My manager didn't want to eliminate them entirely, so we agreed on a rule: real photography for concrete contexts like client cases or team content, illustrations for everything else. That agreement was what made expanding the library make sense.

Expanding the illustration library had a cost problem. The external illustrator was expensive and didn't scale. I created a brush in Illustrator aligned to the style of the existing illustrations to bring the process in-house without breaking visual consistency. I started illustrating until the library had coverage across the recurring content formats. From the original 7 PNG illustrations, the system grew to over 50 in vector. Once the volume was sufficient, the rest of the team started illustrating with the same brush and today they do it independently.

Over time, infographics revealed a typographic problem. The primary typeface didn't handle the hierarchies that format required. I designed a secondary typeface from scratch in Illustrator, letter by letter, hand-drawn, so the stroke was consistent with the illustration style and created contrast with the primary typeface. The first version was a file where the design team would go to find each character. It worked at first. As we used it more, composing a sentence took too long, so I converted it into an installable typeface. It eliminated the text composition time with that typeface and cut production time for pieces using it roughly in half. It also made it usable for people outside the design team. Today the entire marketing team and VPs outside design use it, mainly for presentations.

Templates followed the same diagnostic. LinkedIn carousels were being built from scratch every time: safe zones re-decided per piece, typographic scale recreated manually. Brochures had the same issue. I built base structures for both. The rule was simple: if a problem was going to repeat, it needed a fixed answer.

The dynamic with my manager worked because she didn't have visibility into what was missing and I did. That built trust: I built what I considered necessary, presented it, and every time it accelerated a process, the space to keep building grew.

Everything is documented in Figma foundations, built in parallel without a formal project assigned. It's the first time the brand has a real working reference. What changed in practice: before, every new piece required interpreting the system from scratch. Now there's a reference. The team knows what to compare against.

Scilife didn't need a designer to "move faster". What was missing wasn't speed, it was structure and scale. That difference wasn't visible from the inside: marketing leadership didn't have a design background to detect it, and I was the one who could name what "wasn't working". Building it informally works to get started, but without a formal project things stay incomplete. What ended up formalizing the system was explaining, project by project, why each guideline mattered. That's what made the brand system a real priority today.