• ASAPP Brand Refresh
• ASAPP Making Design More Accessible
• UBC Physics & Astronomy Rebrand & Website Rebuild
• UBC Physics & Astronomy Humans of PHAS

ASAPP Brand Fresh

I took over Design at ASAPP in November 2024. At that time, the brand was in dire need of a refresh as the look and feel no longer align with where the product and messaging were going. The harsh color contrast and abstract visual style conflicted with the approachable enterprise customer experience we wanted to communicate. Additionally, the brand hub was outdated, and the company-wide slide template was bloated. There were no official document templates or letterhead.

I then led a brand refresh that included:

• Creating the new positioning and messaging with the Content team
• With an agency, redefining the brand colors, font, and top-level creative direction for the new website.
• Developing the brand guidelines, style guide, and trademark usage guide
• Rebuilding ASAPP’s new brand hub

Making Design More Accessible

Keeping a consistent brand look had been a struggle for the company. Even with the brand refresh, GTM teams struggled to adopt it on short timelines, creating a bottleneck for the Design team.

When the company deploying Claude Enterprise, I used Claude Design to build an ASAPP design system with branded slide deck and document templates. I introduce them to the GTM teams with a best-practices guide, giving the teams a way to directly create materials, so we can preserve design resources for high-priority work. . A Sales team member said, “no wonder I see a difference in the slides; they look so good!”

UBC Rebrand & Website Rebuild

When I joined the department in 2009, the department had no consistent brand look and design style. Additionally, the department’s website looked like it was built in the 90s. None of this represented one of Canada’s largest physics and astronomy departments.

I worked with the department head to form a website committee of physics and astronomy professors and led the website redesign project. Working with an agency, we:

• Developed a department logo and visual identity
• Defined brand colors and style
• Rebuilt the information architecture of the department website
• Started a news section on the website, which served as a dedicated channel to announce department news and research stories

I later led a second website rebuild to migrate the site to a newer version of Drupal, and at the same time refreshed the site to align with UBC’s new university-wide website look and feel.

UBC Physics & Astronomy Humans of PHAS

Physicists and astronomers are often associated with stereotypes about who they are, what they look like, and how they got into the field. There was also a perception that the discipline lacked diversity, which could discourage students who might otherwise be interested in physics and astronomy.

The Humans of PHAS project was inspired the Humans of New York. Through personal stories of physicists and astronomers within the department, we wanted to break down the stereotype and encourage students from all backgrounds and experiences to join the department.

I worked with Professor Jess McIver to create the project, and worked with a designer to feature 30 professors, staff, students, and alumni, sharing their paths into physics and astronomy, the challenges they faced, what they were working on, and what motivated them.

The project was two-prong:

• Public installation of large format posters in the halls students passed by daily. Each installation includes a QR code that students could scan to visit the website.
• Website with a collection of physicist and astronomer stories, that are links to their research project websites, publications, and more.

Years later, when I met with students, I still heard them comment on how the stories had inspired them.