Designing Product Launch Experiences
Date
2025
Role
Austin, TX
Services
Brand Identity
Art Direction
The Brief
Overview
Hum needed a shelf presence for a drink built around calm, sustained energy rather than a jolt. We designed a can and identity system quiet enough to stand apart in an aisle full of neon, loud claims, and cartoon mascots.
The Challenge
The energy drink category is visually deafening — bright colors, aggressive type, and shouted claims on every can. A calmer product risked disappearing entirely if it played by the category’s existing visual rules.
Fragmented knowledge
Component information lived across disconnected guides, trackers, and files.
Knowledge dependency
Usage guidance often depended on asking someone who already knew the answer.
Design Principles
Work faster, together
Make components easier to find and apply, reducing time spent searching through scattered guides and trackers.
One source of truth
Centralize components and documentation so teams can quickly access reliable, up-to-date guidance.
Every teammate, aligned
Give designers, PMs, and partners a shared understanding of how components work and when to
use them.
While applying the system..
Rather than simply recreating existing components, I focused on capturing the rules behind them—when they should be used, how they behave responsively, and what variations designers actually needed.
Scaling the system
Looking ahead
Outcome
→ Production time dropped noticeably — teammates no longer rebuilt the same patterns from scratch on every launch.
→ Consistency held up even as multiple designers worked independently across different launches.
→ Handoff friction eased, with fewer implementation discrepancies once components shipped with clear, documented specs.
Reflection
The Value of shared understanding
The harder part was getting a team of designers with different habits to actually adopt a shared system instead of quietly working around it. That meant treating documentation and rationale as seriously as the components themselves: a library nobody understands the "why" behind doesn't get used, no matter how well it's built.
This project also reframed how I think about working within someone else's brand system: the constraint wasn't the ceiling, it was the foundation I was responsible for building well on top of.