Datadog Systems
As a Graphic Designer on Datadog's Brand team, a growing part of my role has shifted from making individual assets to building the systems that let others make them. Marketing teams across the company need a steady stream of social posts, ads, flyers, & event materials on tight timelines. Routing every request through our Jira queue slowed them down & pulled our designers away from higher-level work. My goal was to give stakeholders the tools to create on-brand assets themselves, with full owndership of their content & timelines.
At the core of this effort is a Figma Buzz template system for high-volume marketing assets. Each template connects to our Brand team’s Figma library, so stakeholders can customize copy, imagery, & layouts while type, color, & components stay true to brand standards. To date, I’ve built 100+ templates across digital & print. To roll them out, I designed an onboarding deck that adapts to each marketing team’s needs & onboarded 75+ marketing stakeholders. Year over year, flyer requests fell roughly 25%, recovering 2+ weeks of design team capacity annually.
From there, I extended the system beyond Buzz. I built a Claude-powered icon picker that suggests an icon for each bullet point on a flyer or asset that pulls directly from our marketing icon library. I also used Claude Cowork to turn scattered archives into usable libraries by extracting elements from our blog illustrations, building a library of product dashboard images, & analyzing past booth design files to shape a set of print-ready event templates in our Bynder DAM.. Together, these tools give marketers a clear path to on-brand work while giving our team more room to focus on higher-level projects.