The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — Creative Director (Visual Identity · Welfare/Deseret Industries · FamilySearch Discovery)
Brand leadership at global scale.
Across three deployments for a worldwide institution, I repositioned a mission brand for a 20%+ lift in donations, built brand systems that still run across the global enterprise years later, and trained teams across three continents.
The Challenge
Set aside the religious mission and the Church operates as a genuinely global enterprise — a worldwide brand with real performance needs, a portfolio of sub-brands and humanitarian efforts, and a hard operating truth: much of the work that expresses the brand around the world is done by volunteers and staff with no professional design background.
So the brand had to do two difficult things at once: stay consistent across the entire globe, and stay locally relevant everywhere it showed up. And specific mission brands underneath it needed to be sharpened to actually drive results.
My Role
I worked in the Church's deployment model — deployed to lead projects and influence outcomes, not to manage a standing team. Over three years and three deployments — Welfare/Deseret Industries, FamilySearch Discovery, and the Visual Identity Office — I led strategy and creative at global scale, driving results through influence across headquarters groups, agency partners, and area offices on multiple continents.
That influence-based leadership — aligning people you don't manage around a shared standard — is exactly the muscle enterprise creative leadership runs on.
The Approach
Deseret Industries — I bet the mission on a different audience. Deseret Industries uses a chain of thrift stores to fund a deeper mission: job training for people facing setbacks and barriers to work. The stores run on donations — more donations mean better inventory, better revenue, and more reinvested in the people being trained. For years the marketing had pushed “come shop our thrift stores” at a shopper audience. I made the call to flip the strategy entirely — away from shoppers, toward donors — and tell the stories of the people the program was changing. It was a real fight against the belief that thrift-shopper marketing was the answer. It wasn’t.
FamilySearch — I designed for the audience everyone else overlooked. Leading UX on an interactive family-history discovery experience, I built a distinct experience for Chinese visitors — whose family history is surname-based rather than tree-and-record based. Busloads of tourists who’d have found the standard experience irrelevant could now trace their family’s origins and migration across centuries of Chinese history. Same brand, an entirely different and culturally true experience.
Visual Identity — I made a global brand executable by anyone, anywhere. Handed a new brand identity, I built the systems that let it live consistently worldwide — photography, print, magazine, broadcast, iconography, app icons, packaging, and social — and created the training that let volunteers and staff with no design background apply it accurately and in a locally relevant way.
Deseret social campaign; FamilySearch/Chinese experience screens; brand-system guideline spreads.
The Work
Led by me, with headquarters specialists and agency partners.
Deseret Industries
A social-first repositioning built around the mission and the real people it serves, developed with the social lead and directed through the agency.
FamilySearch Discovery
UI/UX for the interactive discovery experience, and the bespoke Chinese-visitor experience, designed start to finish.
Visual Identity
Published global brand-system guidelines spanning photography, print, magazine, broadcast, iconography, app icons, packaging, and social — plus a repeatable training program delivered in person in South Africa, Ghana, and Hong Kong, with a template that scaled the training to the rest of the Church's fourteen global area offices.
The showcase section — global brand system, the discovery experience, training in the area offices.
The Outcome
Deseret Industries — a strategic audience shift with a measurable result. Engagement went from dozens of interactions per post to thousands of likes, shares, and comments — and donations rose more than 20% at some stores, feeding the revenue that funds the job-training mission. A brand decision that moved a real business number.
FamilySearch — a whole new audience engaged. Chinese visitors could finally experience family history in a way built for them.
Visual Identity — systems that outlasted me. The brand systems and training model were adopted across a worldwide enterprise — and years after I left, elements I built are still in use: app icons, website iconography, photography standards, and magazine covers.
What It Took
The work here wasn't about fighting fires; it was the quieter, harder task of moving a 200-year-old institution toward change without breaking what makes it endure. The Deseret repositioning took a genuine battle to win. And the deepest lesson was about a kind of leadership I'd use everywhere after: leading through influence rather than authority — aligning groups you don't manage, across headquarters and around the world, around a single standard. At enterprise scale, that's the whole game.