Designing for a Brand
That Wore Two Faces
Six pieces of sales and marketing collateral for TELUS Digital — each one a negotiation between the parent telco's visual identity and the audience-specific language a global CX and technology company actually needs to speak.
One logo. Wildly different rooms.
TELUS in Canada is a telco. Hockey ads. Friendly animals. Brand built for consumers in living rooms. TELUS Digital — the CX and technology arm, formerly TELUS International — sold AI data solutions, content moderation, and enterprise digital transformation to CFOs, gaming executives, institutional investors, and procurement teams across four continents. Same parent brand. Completely different conversation.
Every piece of collateral I produced lived inside that tension. The TELUS hexagons and the purple sculptural flower had to be there. The corporate white and the specific shade of TELUS green were mandatory. But a crypto platform account team, a gaming executive who grew up on Roblox, and an IR analyst reviewing a quarterly factsheet for a NYSE-listed company needed to feel like the material was written for them — not adapted from a telco's style guide.
That navigation — satisfying brand compliance without letting it flatten the audience-specific work — was the constant design problem across 13 years and hundreds of deliverables. These six pieces represent the range.
A confidential cryptocurrency exchange — one of the largest in the world at the time — needed to demonstrate to their platform that enterprise CX outsourcing could scale without sacrificing quality. The audience was B2B technology buyers. The design challenge was to speak "fintech" inside a brand that speaks "telco."
The 3D purple sculptural flower — a mandatory TELUS brand element — appears only on the final results page, set against a dark circuit board background. Compliance satisfied at the point of minimum interference. The CTA page winds down content anyway; a decorative element doesn't compete there. This was the consistent strategy across all six pieces: place mandatory brand moments where they do the least harm to the editorial work.
The curve on the cover is the real brand negotiation. TELUS Digital's template geometry favored the soft-cornered white content area cutting across a full-bleed hero image — softer and more approachable than the hard rectangular cutouts common in B2B tech. It worked for crypto because the softness read as trustworthiness rather than consumer-friendly, which is exactly the reassurance a volatile-asset client needed to communicate.
This two-pager was among the first pieces of collateral produced after TELUS Digital's radical rebrand — a transformation I led in collaboration with the newly acquired WillowTree team. It was a brand awareness piece, and as the first standard collateral to land in the market under the new visual identity, it had to get the new system right under pressure.
The WillowTree acquisition merged two design cultures mid-flight. The 3D sculptural object in the right column — now a glossy forest green organic form instead of the signature purple flower from the pre-rebrand crypto piece — is the rebrand visible in a single element. Same placement logic, new material language. The new green reads as nature-technology-premium rather than telco-consumer. Different mood, same structural position.
The global footprint country list, the solutions grid, the testimonial treatment with oversized quote marks, the award badge row — these are the unglamorous but essential components of any enterprise sales brochure. The discipline here was keeping each component at a consistent baseline and letting the typographic hierarchy do the differentiation work rather than adding visual embellishment to every section.
Sales enablement for TELUS International's AI Data Solutions division — a unit that competed directly with Scale AI and Appen for enterprise machine learning data contracts. The localization challenge here was not translation. It was structural fidelity: keeping the English and Japanese versions pixel-for-pixel identical in layout while accommodating a writing system where character density, line-break rules, vertical rhythm, and typographic hierarchy all behave completely differently from Latin alphabets.
Kinsoku shori — the line-break restriction rules that prevent small kana (ぁぃぅぇぉ) and certain punctuation from appearing at the start or end of a line — required active research. The correct sizing for kana at paragraph starts, the treatment of mixed Latin/Japanese headings ("TELUS International" + "AIデータソリューション" on the same display line), the validation of natural break points: these were not problems that could be solved with InDesign's auto settings. I worked directly with a bilingual marketing specialist in Japan to review and approve each line break — which meant I needed to understand the problem well enough to know which questions to ask.
French localization on other brochures presented a different version of the same problem. French runs 15–20% longer than English on average, which means every text box that fits English copy needs to be re-engineered for French without breaking the grid. Chinese versions I worked on separately — where basic Mandarin reading ability informed font aesthetic decisions and layout choices that would have otherwise been made blind to the writing system's visual logic.
Most Western designers hand off localization to translators and assume the layout survives intact. It never does. The discipline of structural localization — maintaining grid fidelity across writing systems, understanding the typographic rules of each language rather than approximating them — is what separates a brochure that reads as professionally translated from one that reads as designed for that market from the start.
TELUS Digital had several gaming accounts — content moderation contracts with major platforms whose player communities were growing faster than their trust and safety infrastructure could keep pace. The recurring feedback from games executives was pointed: "Your look and feel is too old-school corporate to speak to a bunch of executives that grew up as gamers."
The client in this piece cannot be named, but knowing it was a major free-to-play platform built around user-generated content and low-poly 3D worlds makes the image choices self-evident. The low-poly illustration style is a direct visual reference to that platform's aesthetic universe — a Roblox-world executive opens this document and feels at home, without the piece ever breaking client confidentiality.
The white content areas here are cut at sharp diagonal angles — not the soft curve from the crypto piece. More kinetic. More games-industry. That departure from the standard TELUS Digital template geometry was deliberate: the shape language itself signals that this document knows its audience. The TELUS green circle bullets do double duty — on-brand, but they also read as player icons or online status indicators in gaming UI. Whether intentional or happy accident, they work.
Three image registers appear across the three pages: real photography with neon lighting, low-poly 3D illustration, and a 3D-rendered gaming hardware cluster. The structural device that holds them together is the diagonal white shape — it appears on every page at a consistent angle, creating rhythm across the document even as the image types shift dramatically beneath it.
This one-pager updated quarterly, contemporaneous with TELUS International's IPO, for institutional investors following the NYSE: TIXT and TSX: TIXT dual listing. It had to match the visual language used across every investor-facing document from the beginning of the IPO process. The Investor Relations team had strong opinions and seniority to match them.
TELUS brand guidelines specify ragged left-aligned text for all body copy across all materials. The IR team wanted fully justified body text — "more corporate, more serious." I flagged the brand standards violation. I lost the argument on seniority grounds. I made it work anyway. The triangle diagram in the capabilities section wasn't my concept either — it was inherited from existing investor materials, and my job was to make it as minimal as possible so it didn't undermine the layout's cleanliness. Senior constraints are real constraints. Delivering good work inside them is the skill.
This document updated quarterly. The donut charts showing revenue diversification needed to reflect new numbers every cycle without rebuilding the layout from scratch. I discovered, through experimentation rather than documentation, that Excel pie charts could be copied as vectors directly into Adobe Illustrator. The Illustrator file was then embedded live in InDesign — not as a flattened image, as a live link. Stakeholders updated numbers in Google Sheets, downloaded as Excel, and the vector charts propagated through to the final layout with pixel-perfect precision. The workflow was cumbersome. The output was exact.
Two pages. Company overview. Six-pillar differentiation framework. Two financial metrics. Capabilities diagram. Global presence map. Three donut charts. Nine executive headshots with titles. IR contact block. That information density compressed into two pages without looking crowded required a discipline of grid adherence that left very little room for expressive design decisions. The factsheet doesn't show the work the way other pieces do — its quality is in what it doesn't do wrong.
A 17-page long-form white paper making the case for TELUS Digital's CX outsourcing model to growth-stage technology companies needing to scale headcount rapidly. The content arrived as a minimally formatted Google Doc. My role was layout, illustration curation, and editorial shaping — which meant actively suggesting pull quotes, identifying where the text needed data callouts, and building visual breaks that the content creators hadn't planned for.
The 60% callout on page 5 wasn't in the Google Doc. Neither was the pull quote on page 6, the dashed border treatment marking mini client case sections, or the decision to convert the recruitment process into a horizontal flowchart with timing callouts. Those were editorial interventions — identifying the most important number on a page, isolating it, giving it room, letting the design argue for its significance before the reader even reads the sentence around it. Content design on top of layout work.
TELUS Canada is known for its "Critters" — the animals and plants that appear in consumer advertising. These are highly distinctive and completely untranslatable to enterprise sales contexts. The butterflies on the back page aren't an aesthetic choice; they're a brand compliance requirement. Every piece of TELUS International collateral needed at least one critter or proprietary plant element visible, typically in a CTA or closing section. The consistent solution across the portfolio: place the mandatory element at the end, where the document is winding down and a decorative flourish doesn't compete with content. The rest of the document's illustration budget — four distinct styles across 17 pages, all curated for tonal consistency without a single critter in sight — could then do its job uninterrupted.
Brand tension, navigated repeatedly
These six pieces span fintech, gaming, investor relations, enterprise AI sales, and long-form editorial. They share nothing in terms of audience, format, or visual register. What they share is the problem: a parent brand that speaks consumer, a business that speaks enterprise, and the daily work of making those two things coexist without either one embarrassing the other.
The skill demonstrated here isn't aesthetic range — though there is that. It's the ability to work within real constraints (brand mandates, IR requirements, stakeholder seniority, mandatory critter placements) and still produce work that communicates precisely to the people it's meant for. That's what enterprise design actually is.