This project is close to my heart. It's the story of inheriting a brand, discovering its limits, and earning the trust to rebuild it from the inside. We worked as a small team, with real constraints, and made each decision with intention and care for the craft.
TextNow brand refresh
The starting point
When I joined TextNow as the first in-house brand designer, a third-party agency had just delivered an initial set of foundational brand guidelines.
My job was to make them real: translating the vision into marketing, communications, and the day-to-day creative output of a growing company.
The opportunity
In marketing, the brand felt confident and fresh, but inside the product, the cracks showed quickly. Colors failed accessibility standards, iconography didn't scale, and the sheer volume of visual elements made consistent application nearly impossible for product and agency designers alike.
Around the time we paused to evaluate how visually overwhelming our expression was becoming, the company was also wanting to make strategic shift. A new voice, a sharper market position, a clearer sense of who we were. The case for a refresh made itself.
The refresh initiative
Design lead: Mar Yama
Senior designer: Daphna Sebbane
Staff designer: Nenad Grujicic
Knowing my team had deep product knowledge and close collaboration with our internal marketing team, we decided to own the refresh internally instead of engaging with another agency.
The goal was never just a visual facelift, it was to build a system that could scale, travel across every channel, and be grounded in where the company was actually headed.
Leading the Work Led workshops, gave critique, delegated and iterated alongside senior and staff level designers
Bridging the Gaps Served as the primary cross-functional liaison between design, product, and marketing orgs
Keeping Things Aligned Kept the initiative aligned with evolving brand strategy, go-to-market timelines, and product roadmap
My role
Keeping People in the Loop Communicated updates and progress at the company level on behalf of the design org
Bringing Partners Along Onboarded and trained internal and third party agency partners on the new brand
What we delivered
Brand guidelines website with downloadable resources and Figma asset library with reusable visual elements
In-product guidance along with updates to the UI kit, accessible colors, type scale, iconography, and component styling
Production ready templates for ads, print, social, App Store, and lifecycle marketing campaigns
Non-designer resource packages including presentation templates, swag, Slack emojis, and social profile assets
Biggest takeaway
Reflecting on this project, I found that considering how we were building and who we were building for mattered just as much as what we were creating. Making design decisions work everywhere at once, across marketing, product, and everything in between, only happens when the right people are aligned, empowered, and pulling in the same direction.
This project deepened my love for that intersection of craft and collaboration, and confirmed it's exactly where I want to keep working.