top of page
Governing a global brand across seven studios
Framestore
Brand Governance · Brand Systems
The Challenge
Framestore's brand had to hold across seven studios - London, New York, Mumbai, Montreal, Melbourne, Chicago and LA - while serving a relentless flow of pitches, conferences and communications. The problem wasn't the identity; it was the operating model. Brand work ran through one-to-one handovers and bespoke builds, which meant every deck, every asset and every studio request queued through a bottleneck. A global studio needed its brand to work like infrastructure: consistent by default, fast without supervision.
My Role
Senior Internal Brand Designer, and the design point of sign-off for brand work across all seven studios. The remit was governance in the real sense: not policing the brand, but building the systems, standards and relationships that let hundreds of people use it correctly without asking.
The Approach
1. Hold the line, visibly
As the sign-off point for brand work studio-wide, I set and upheld the standard every output was measured against. Governance only works when the rules are legible, so the standards were documented, demonstrated and consistently applied - the difference between a brand guardian and a brand blocker.
2. Systemise the heaviest workload
Presentations were the biggest drain, so they got the deepest system: a modular presentation framework serving 10+ global conferences including In Motion and Web Summit. Deck prep dropped from a week to under a day - the same quality, a fraction of the cost, repeated across every event cycle.
3. Replace handovers with self-service
A template library and documentation set removed the need for one-to-one handovers across all seven studios. Assets were built for local adaptation from the start, so each studio could flex the brand for its own market without breaking it - structure where it mattered, freedom where it didn't.
4. Close the perception gap
Partnering with marketing, communications and recruitment, I worked on the gap between how Framestore looked to clients and how it looked to talent - aligning the employer brand and the commercial brand so both audiences met the same studio.
Outcome
Deck production cut from a week to under a day across a 10+ conference calendar. One-to-one handovers eliminated across seven studios through self-service systems. One coherent brand, locally adaptable, globally governed - maintained through a period when the studio's output and visibility demands kept climbing.
Why this matters
Brand governance is usually invisible until it fails. This role is proof of the version that works: standards people can actually follow, systems that make the right thing the fast thing, and a brand that scales because nobody has to queue for it. It's the difference between owning a brand and operating one - and operating one is the job.
bottom of page