Brand building at Redgate

Building the systems and foundations behind a consistent, scalable brand.

Overview

Over three and a half years as a Digital Designer within Redgate’s brand team, a significant part of my role was building and maintaining the infrastructure that allowed the wider team to produce consistent, high-quality output at scale. This wasn’t just about creating assets — it was about creating the systems that meant others didn’t have to start from scratch every time.

Targets

The goal was to reduce reliance on the brand team for day-to-day output, while raising the overall quality and consistency of work produced across the business. This meant building systems that were comprehensive enough to cover most use cases, flexible enough to adapt to new contexts, and accessible enough for non-designers to use confidently — across the UK and internationally.

I was one of the co-authors of Redgate’s Figma design system, a comprehensive and collaboratively maintained resource covering everything from core brand assets — typography, colour, iconography — through to a full template building system with variables and colour modes. I owned the Simple Talk section of the system entirely, and contributed to building components across the wider system alongside the rest of the brand team. Good systems work is rarely a solo effort, and being a reliable, collaborative contributor to a shared resource used globally was as important as any individual output.

Alongside the Figma system, I contributed to Redgate’s overarching brand guidelines — collating existing principles, creating new elements where gaps existed, and helping bring everything together into an accessible Canva presentation used as a reference point across the business. These guidelines informed how teams built icons, maintained visual consistency, and made day-to-day design decisions without needing to escalate every query.

I also developed a wide suite of Canva templates covering a broad range of use cases, enabling marketing, content and sales teams across the UK, US, Australia and beyond to produce on-brand materials independently. The Canva approval system meant teams had genuine autonomy over their output while the brand team retained oversight — a balance that sped up creation considerably without sacrificing quality or consistency.

The aim throughout was the same: design that scales beyond a single designer, and systems that keep working long after the project wraps.

Related Projects

Other major projects during my time at Redgate are outlined on the Simple Talk, Cavendish House, and Flyway With Us portfolio entries.