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Disguise
DISGUISE 2022-2025
The Challenge: Scaling Design for Growth
When I joined Disguise as VP of Design, the company stood at a pivotal point. With ambitions to evolve from a niche tech provider of media servers and live events software, into a global creative platform leader.
The brand needed to scale — across products, markets, and verticals. But the current brand system was fragmented, making it difficult to maintain consistency, communicate premiumness, or resonate with new and diverse audiences.
The opportunity was clear: we needed to design for growth, cohesion, and recognisability — not just aesthetically, but systematically.
The Vision: A Unified Brand Operating System
I spearheaded the development of a Brand Operating System (BrandOS) — a strategic and creative framework that would act as the connective tissue between product experiences and communications.
Simply based on 3 brand truths.
New Typography (Adding clarity and scalability)
New Palette (Adding vibrancy)
New Logo (Keeping legacy equity)
This system was not just a design refresh — it was a rethinking of how Disguise showed up at every touchpoint:
- From user interface to marketing campaigns.
- From product logos to learning platforms.
- From internal documentation to global partner toolkits.
At its core, the Brand OS provided a modular, scalable design architecture — supporting multiple sub-brands (like Cloud, Designer, Porta, RenderStream) while ensuring each felt unmistakably part of the Disguise ecosystem.
The Craft: Design Systems as Visual Intelligence
I led a multi-disciplinary team to redefine the visual and verbal identity from the ground up:
- Tone of Voice: Shifted from technical and niche to confident, inclusive, and globally aspirational — appealing to both creative technologists and enterprise clients.
- Pictographic Language: Introduced a flexible iconography system, designed to support UI, product comms, and educational material — allowing rapid onboarding across products without losing brand cohesion.
- Visual Elements: Developed a refined and dynamic visual toolkit — including a grid-based layout system, motion principles, colour strategy, typography, and imagery style — designed to scale across platforms and mediums.
- Sub-Brand Design System: Built guidelines and reusable components to enable internal and external teams to implement sub-brands with ease, reducing design bottlenecks while elevating brand consistency.
The Pictograms
From UI
To Spatial Experience
To Product Identities
The Execution: From Strategy to Practice
I drove collaboration across Product, Marketing, and Executive teams to embed the brand system into every design decision and product workflow. Key deliverables included:
- Launch of a shared brand library in Figma and Styleguide platforms.
- Training for internal teams and global partners to self-serve high-quality branded assets.
- Overhaul of web and product UI to align with the Brand OS.
- Implementation across live shows, platform comms, support channels, and training content — reinforcing brand recognition globally.
The Outcome: Design as a Growth Engine
The impact of this transformation was measurable:
- Faster go-to-market for new product verticals.
- Identity establish at trade shows and global offices.
- Increased brand affinity across creative and enterprise segments.
- A unified design language across marketing and product — leading to higher engagement, stronger user trust, and global recognition.
But perhaps most importantly, this shift established Design as a strategic function within the business — not only shaping how Disguise looked, but how it thought, communicated, and scaled.