Brand Design Manager

2021 - 2023

Rebuilding Lark’s brand, website, and creative workflows to improve enrollment and team efficiency

Role: Creative and operational systems lead

Strategic Goal: Improve enrollment clarity, refresh the brand, and consolidate digital platforms

Team: 3 designers + cross-functional partners (IT, Security, Legal, DesignOps)

Highlights:

Consolidated 3 platforms → 1 (Webflow)
Web update turnaround: months → days
Lighthouse scores: overall (+15%), SEO 65% → 93%, Accessibility 83% → 98%
Improved patient enrollment + lowered acquisition costs through testing
Built scalable brand, illustration, and icon systems
Reworked Jira workflow to support 1,000+ annual projects

The Challenge

The patient enrollment experience was fragmented across multiple platforms, causing missed milestones and putting key partnerships at risk. The brand no longer reflected Lark’s product offering or business direction, and the creative team’s processes made it difficult to deliver high-quality work at scale.

The Approach

Using user insights and internal feedback, I partnered with leadership to recommend a full reset of both the brand and our web infrastructure. This was not a cosmetic refresh. We needed to simplify the enrollment journey, consolidate platforms, establish brand clarity, and create operational systems that could support long-term growth.

Driving Alignment and Creative Direction

Unifying Cross-Functional Partners

Consolidating platforms required continuous collaboration across Brand, Product, Marketing, IT, Security, Legal, Support and our partners. I managed vendor conversations, clarified requirements, and kept all teams aligned through structured updates. My role was to remove friction, keep decisions clear, and maintain momentum.

Defining Core Brand Strategy

To create a shared standard for creative decision-making, I facilitated workshops that helped establish the Brand story, guiding principle, archetype, and our core brand attributes: Empowering, Engaging, Reliable, Vibrant. This work informed new guidelines and briefs that aligned teams and ensured consistent brand expression.

Team Leadership and Development

I set clear ownership across initiatives while providing strategy and art direction.

One designer built the brand design system and Webflow foundation
One owned illustration and iconography
One managed brand expansion across channels

This structure strengthened design ownership, improved confidence, and elevated quality across the board.

Implementing Scalable Systems

I created a unified brand system that functioned as the single source of truth, integrating illustration, iconography, and photography guidelines. This brought consistency to every touchpoint and dramatically reduced decision friction for cross-functional teams.
To support 1,000+ annual projects, I partnered with the DesignOps Lead to overhaul our Jira intake system. We introduced a tiered prioritization model and visual forecasting, improving transparency, reducing inefficiency, and enabling healthier collaboration with stakeholders.
I led the migration from three disconnected web platforms to a single, unified Webflow environment. This improved performance, reduced technical debt, and made updates dramatically faster.
- Web updates went from months to days
- Testing moved from a few times a year to weekly
- The team gained a stable foundation for iteration and experimentation

Measuring Strategic Success

Direct Business
Impact

Iterative landing page testing, including shifts from illustration to photography, improved patient enrollment and reduced CAC, supporting key partner milestones.

Technical Health and Quality

Our migration improved Lighthouse scores by 15 percent overall, with SEO rising from 65 percent to 93 percent and Accessibility rising from 83 percent to 98 percent. This strengthened both user experience and platform reliability.

Operational
Efficiency

With a unified platform and clearer DesignOps workflows, the team could handle a high project volume with better predictability and noticeably faster turnaround.

"Josh was able to take the brand from a start-up feel to an established player in the health tech industry due to his leadership. I'm extremely grateful to have been able to benefit from his knowledgeable insight into building processes, determining the right audiences, and delivering designs that are meant to drive education and action."

Kara Neary
Director, Marketing
"Josh was brought in to provide structure and focus to the Brand Design team, and he did exactly that in a way that clarified their goals and priorities. He had a clear vision and sense of purpose, which informed the processes and systems we were able to design together. That clarity made it easy to identify process gaps, and to reveal and unblock bottlenecks. Josh is always an absolute delight to work with--open-minded, creative, and outcome-oriented."

Rebecca Abernathy
Director of Product Operations
"Josh was an incredibly thoughtful and engaged manager who I could rely on to offer guidance as well as hands-on support. He was instrumental in establishing our team direction and values, and was a fantastic listener who not only asked for, but welcomed, feedback and discussion. He has a keen eye for detail, and a commitment to quality design, and he wields those qualities well as a manager - always providing productive feedback and helping his team members learn and succeed."

Caroline Volin
Senior Designer
"Josh accomplished an incredible amount at Lark. He built Lark's first brand design team, generated an extensive brand library, and set up efficient processes and lines of cross-departmental communication. Josh cares a lot about his work and his reports, and it shines through in his team's product and culture."

Emily Humphreys
Principal, User Experience Research and Strategy
"Josh was swift to organize and create a detail-oriented plan and framework for our team. Under his guidance, our team was able to collaborate effectively with different teams and produce a variety of different work for internal and external stakeholders. Josh gave great feedback and would continually push me to challenge my designs to make them even better. I’m appreciative of him being attentive to my personal and professional growth, which has helped me tremendously."

Katherine Chang
Visual Designer
"Josh led and drove the design portion of our landing pages optimization, our ad creatives creation as well as our transition to a new CMS. Josh demonstrated exceptional approach to design, he is process oriented with a data driven mindset."

Johnathan Perkal
Director of Marketing Analytics
"Work with Josh for an hour and you’ll notice his passion for design and dedication to creating quality work. Above all, Josh is a valuable team player, who is always willing to lend his expertise to support the success of the team and is always looking for ways to build positive relationships among team members."

Art Lopez
Product Design Manager