Brand as a system, made scalable.
Most brand work stops at a set of guidelines. Mine doesn’t.
Guidelines can’t keep up any more: everyone makes content now, AI has multiplied how much, and a brand team that acts as a checkpoint either slows everything down or gets bypassed.
So I build brand as a system instead: a clear brand, plus the workflows and tools that let every team produce consistent work without a designer in the middle of every request. The right thing becomes the easy thing.
The work tends to take one of two shapes. Brands that are strong but hard to apply, where the job is building the workflows that make them stick. And brands that aren’t defined yet, where it starts with strategy and identity and carries through to activation and scale.
The stack I work to
Every brand I run gets built in the same four layers, in order.
1 · Foundation
Strategy, positioning, voice, identity. Settled first and written down, so every choice in the layers above traces back to a reason.
2 · Guidance
The applied rules: how the brand behaves in a deck, an ad, an email, on a stand. Rules, not a gallery of examples. Most guidelines die here, as inspiration documents nobody can act on.
3 · Enablement
The templates, tools, and workflows that put the brand in everyone’s hands. If following the brand takes more effort than ignoring it, the brand loses. Increasingly this layer is AI: generation with the rules built in.
4 · Governance
The checks that keep quality up without a person in the way: automated review, hard gates before anything ships, and a feedback loop back into the rules.
Foundation makes it right, guidance makes it clear, enablement makes it easy, and governance keeps it that way. Certinia got the first three layers by hand. Dremio got all four, with AI doing the heavy lifting.
Where it’s been proven
At Dremio I joined a function with no brand strategy and rebuilt it into a system the whole company runs on: positioning, voice, and visual identity; a governed design system; generative‑AI workflows that let any team create on‑brand copy, documents, and decks unaided; and a prototype that publishes on‑brand web pages straight from a brief.
Before that, eight years at Certinia, from marketing apprentice to Creative Manager, ending with a brand refresh that took an identity built for looks and made it usable: ten secondary colours cut to four, guidelines rewritten from examples open to interpretation into rules people follow, and the website re‑platformed.
Underneath both sits a production background: years hands‑on with video, photography, and design before and alongside running brand. It matters more than it sounds. A strategy that can’t be produced doesn’t get carried; knowing what production actually takes is what keeps the strategy feasible, and what keeps the production aligned to the strategy instead of drifting off on its own.
A lot of what I run on, I build myself: web and AI apps end to end. A pattern runs through them: Sidenote makes AI‑produced HTML reviewable, Legible makes folders of markdown readable, and my demo platform turns product sessions into guided walkthroughs. Each takes raw machine output and makes it usable by people.
I’ve worked with Patrick for over 3 years, and he has consistently demonstrated an uncommon ability to balance creativity, strategy, and execution. He approaches every project he takes on from multiple perspectives and delivers an outstanding end product in addition to new ideas for the future. He is also a master of his craft. Embracing technologies both traditional and new, Patrick knows how and where to leverage AI in design work and when to focus less on the technology and more on the story to be told.
Gregory SmithVP of Product Marketing · my director at Certinia