Index
Case
05 of 05
Manila
2015 to 2021
Agency
Six years art directing consumer campaigns in one of the most competitive attention markets.
Role
Art director. Concept development, art direction.
Context
Agency. Dentsu Jayme Syfu, MullenLowe TREYNA.
With
Creative, strategy, production.
Year
2015 to 2021
Manila is the category leader in freight intelligence. In 2022 the brand did not communicate that, and it did not support the price the company was about to start asking for.
A stronger product and a revised commercial strategy were moving Manila materially upmarket: higher pricing, larger contracts, more senior buyers.
Image · Before and after. The 2022 identity against what preceded it.
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01
Context & challenge
A premium price depends on being read as the authority
Premium pricing depends on the supplier already being regarded as the category authority, and in B2B that judgement is largely formed before sales makes contact. It sits with brand by default, because brand is the only thing operating in the market before there is a conversation.
The brand was working against it. Manila had inherited the visual language of freight, so it read as a shipping business at the point it needed to read as the definitive source of market intelligence.
The challenge for the brand
Establish authority at first impression, so the commercial team confirms a position rather than argues for one.
My role
I led the rebrand end to end, covering design strategy, identity and implementation across every surface. The work started with positioning rather than design. I worked with the VP Marketing, VP Product, product marketing and the product teams to define what Manila is and what it needed to be understood to be, then built the identity out of that.
Approach
Three jobs for the identity
Manila is not a freight company. It sells data and software into an industry that does not buy much of either, and the identity it had belonged to the category it was selling into rather than the one it was creating.
It had to read as premium software rather than logistics, so that price and product were consistent with each other. It had to carry credibility on sight, because when the product is data, credibility is the first thing being judged. And it had to hold movement, because the company’s stated position is that it is changing how freight is bought and sold. A static, conservative identity would have undercut both claims before anyone read a word.
Image · Colour and type system
Image · Motif system
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02 / 03
Considerations
It had to scale. A small team producing continuously, and in time a whole organisation producing without a designer involved. Anything that only held under careful handling would fail at that volume.
It had to present data credibly. Data is the product, so I treated its presentation as a trust problem rather than a styling one. Charts, figures and platform imagery had to carry authority independently of the copy around them.
It had to move without losing recognition. Far enough from the category that Manila stopped being read on freight’s terms, close enough to the existing brand that customers read evolution rather than replacement.
Design decisions
Move away from the category palette. Orange and navy are the conventional colours of freight. A deeper purple with lilac and lime reads as premium software, stays recognisable against the previous identity, and is not occupied by any direct competitor.
Rebuild the website first, with the platform visible. The website is where a buyer researching the category forms their view unprompted, and it had the widest reach of anything we controlled. It was running low-resolution product screenshots, which understated the product. High-quality platform imagery made the technology itself the argument.
Placeholder decision. One sentence naming the decision, then one or two explaining the reasoning behind it. Keep the bold lead-in short enough to scan.
Placeholder decision. One sentence naming the decision, then one or two explaining the reasoning behind it.
Image · Website revamp. Platform imagery in place of screenshots.
Image · Detail
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04 / 05
A pull quote goes here, kept to about twenty words.
Attribution or context
How it evolved
The identity was the shorter part of the work
Designing a system a non-design organisation could use without degrading it took another three years.
Period
What I built
What I learned
What it changed
2022
Identity
Rebrand and 2023 website revamp. Palette, typography, motif system, platform photography.
A strong identity is not automatically a usable one. It held under my handling and degraded elsewhere.
A brand the company could stand behind at the new price point.
2023–24
Systems
Consolidated a fragmented library into one system: 50+ decks, 10+ one-pagers, emails, brochures and templates. Figma workflows, PowerPoint and Word templates, icon and chart standards.
Templates are adopted only where they are faster than the alternative. The first system assumed ideal conditions rather than the time pressure teams actually work under.
A consistent baseline, though every high-quality asset still came through me.
2025–26
Encoded
Guidelines extended beyond visuals into story, positioning and tone. Brand rebuilt as tooling: brand skill, presentation builder with buyer-journey logic, chart and one-pager builders.
Placeholder. Where the system still drifts.
Sales, product and analyst teams produce on-brand work independently, at a volume no single designer could service.
Image · The brand toolkit. Builders and their output.
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06
Image
Image
Image
Caption goes here
07 / 08 / 09
Results
The rebrand was a precondition for the commercial move rather than the cause of it, so the fair measure is whether the brand stopped being an obstacle to it. The upmarket pricing structure went into market and held.
The system reached the sales conversation. A redesigned AE deck replaced a feature list with a narrative, and the same brand slides ran in webinars.
Demo requests from 171 webinar attendees in June, at 75 percent attentiveness
19
Demo requests from 73 attendees in July
12
Decks and one-pagers consolidated into one governed system
50+ / 10+
Placeholder metric
Figure
What I learned
Consumer advertising in a high-competition market teaches economy: one clear idea, executed well, beats a well-funded muddle every time.
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