Overview

CDC's communication priorities moved quickly—from planned national campaigns to emerging public health needs requiring same-day response. As Director, Design & Campaigns, my role was to translate those priorities into clear creative direction and ensure the team, brand systems, and production operation could execute against them at scale.

I led an 11-person multidisciplinary team within a 150+ person in-house agency, delivering more than 3,000 assets annually across digital, social, motion, print, events, and campaigns while balancing organizational urgency with creative quality and brand consistency.

My Role

As Director, Design & Campaigns, I partnered with senior leaders to translate organizational and communication priorities into creative strategy and execution. I set direction across high-visibility initiatives while aligning stakeholders, team capacity, brand standards, and production resources around the work that mattered most.

Aligning Priorities to Execution

With priorities shifting daily, I worked closely with senior leadership to determine what mattered most, establish realistic scope, and translate organizational needs into actionable creative direction. I made real-time decisions around priorities, capacity, and resources—keeping high-value work moving without compromising creative quality or clarity.

Building the Team Behind the Work

Leading at this scale meant building more than capacity. I worked to create clarity around roles, expectations, ownership, and growth so people could do strong work while developing their careers.

I established a pathway from Designer through Art Director, Associate Creative Director, and Creative Director, with clearer expectations and compensation progression. Two people I mentored ultimately advanced into newly created leadership roles, strengthening the team’s leadership capacity from within.

Building an Operating Model for Scale

Enterprise priorities could change quickly, so the creative operation needed to change with them. I modernized workflows, resource planning, and operating rhythms across the broader 150+ person organization, giving leaders greater visibility into priorities and capacity while helping teams respond faster to changing needs.

As new tools emerged, I also introduced AI-assisted workflows to accelerate concept development and production, expand creative capacity, and reduce reliance on external resources.

Strengthening the Enterprise Brand

Scale also exposed a larger challenge: maintaining a coherent brand across 10,000+ staff and 20+ divisions. I led an enterprise visual identity refresh and co-led the redesign of the Brand Hub, creating a more usable system that ultimately achieved 95% adoption and reduced off-brand usage by 40%.

Impact

The result was a creative function capable of responding to very different kinds of organizational needs—from planned national campaigns to urgent, same-day communication—without losing sight of quality, brand, or the people doing the work.

More than increasing output, the goal was to build a creative organization leaders could rely on: one able to understand the priority, shape the response, and mobilize the right people and resources to deliver.

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