When I joined The Leading Hotels of the World, a 200-person company with departments across every region, the brand had solid foundations in type and color but no shared way to build a page. A master guideline and a handful of format-specific PDFs existed, but they had drifted region by region, so the same company looked like several. My hire was the refresh, and it doubled as a signal to the house: visual consistency was now something we took seriously.

The role ran on three tracks. I audited what every department was actually producing, sitting with stakeholders across B2C, B2B, hotelier, and internal teams to map their evergreen work and where it was breaking. I ran creative services as I found it, project-managing the company’s day-to-day design across every region. And I rebuilt the function itself: I reviewed a full year of requests, modeled the operating structures that could scale it, and pitched a new creative services model to senior marketing and management. They adopted it, and LHW restructured around a hybrid team of in-house and freelance designers held together by a defined process.

The visual system was the other half of that rebuild. I led the refresh of the brand’s visual identity, tightening the logo architecture, typography, and color into one book the company could build from. But the core of my contribution was a layer the brand had never had. There was no layout or grid system, and no history of applying one. I built that layer: a modular grid documented for the person using it, designed to scale from a 25-meter banner to a phone screen and to hold a page whether it carried one hotel or fifteen.