Overview

Led enterprise creative operations supporting national campaigns and real-time response at the CDC, delivering more than 3,000 assets annually across digital, motion, and print. The work required balancing speed, scale, and creative quality in a high-stakes, highly visible environment.

My Role

As Creative Director, I owned creative strategy and execution for graphic design and campaigns within a 150+ person in-house creative organization. I partnered with senior leadership to align priorities, directed creative across high-visibility initiatives, and made real-time tradeoff decisions to balance speed, quality, and team capacity.

Types of Work Delivered

Campaign creative, social and digital content, motion and video, print and field materials, and scalable templates supporting enterprise communications and rapid-response efforts.

Leadership & Execution

This work required leading a high-volume creative operation where priorities shifted daily. I oversaw intake, distributed work across teams, and maintained alignment across stakeholders and initiatives. I worked closely with senior leadership to define priorities, set realistic scope, and make tradeoff decisions in real time — ensuring the team could deliver quickly without compromising quality or clarity.

Equally important was building the team infrastructure behind that output. I inherited an 11-person group operating without clear growth paths or performance frameworks and rebuilt it into a multi-level leadership model with structured career criteria, coaching rhythms, and genuine accountability. I lobbied for and secured formal career pathways — Designer → Art Director → ACD → CD — with defined criteria and pay increases attached. Two team members I directly mentored won newly created roles through that process. The result was a team that didn't just perform — it stayed. 96% retention across a period of significant organizational pressure.

Scaling Creative Operations

To support this level of output, I modernized workflows, improved resource alignment, and established clearer operating rhythms across the 150+ person team. This increased throughput, improved consistency, and created better visibility into priorities and capacity.

Brand & Systems Impact

Alongside campaign execution, I led an enterprise visual identity rebuild supporting more than 10,000 staff—achieving 95% brand adoption and reducing off-brand usage by 40%.

I also co-led the redesign of the Brand Hub, improving usability and accessibility while enabling scalable design systems and self-service tools that accelerated content creation across teams.

Technology & Innovation

I introduced AI-assisted workflows and modern creative tools to increase production speed and scalability. These efforts reduced cost per asset and enabled teams to deliver more work, more efficiently, across a growing range of formats and channels.

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