Achieve is a digital personal finance company and the rebranded consumer identity of Freedom Financial Network, a 20-year business whose visuals lacked cohesion across teams and channels. The move to Achieve required more than a new name; it demanded a modern, trustworthy system that could roll out consistently across web, campaigns, presentations, and high-visibility moments. I joined the Brand team to implement the rebrand by creating the brand style guides and partnering with Marketing and Product to scale execution across touchpoints.
Role: Visual Designer, Brand
Focus: Rebrand rollout, brand system + style guides, cross-channel brand execution, vendor direction.
Tools: Figma, Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, After Effects, Premiere), HTML/CSS
The Challenge
Freedom Financial Network had been around for two decades, but its branding didn’t reflect that maturity. Visual identity was inconsistent across teams and channels, assets were often created as one-offs, and there wasn’t a central system to enforce cohesion. As the company rebranded to Achieve, the work needed to do more than look new—it needed to function as a scalable foundation for a modern, trustworthy consumer brand.
The challenge was to operationalize the Achieve identity: codify the rules, establish repeatable patterns, and collaborate across teams and partners so the brand could roll out quickly and stay consistent across web, marketing, and storytelling surfaces—without creating friction for day-to-day production.
Objectives
Implement the Achieve rebrand across priority surfaces quickly and consistently.
Establish a cohesive brand system that scales across channels and teams.
Create and maintain brand style guides so teams could execute without guesswork.
Improve speed and consistency through reusable patterns, templates, and governed assets.
Maintain clarity, hierarchy, and craft across responsive digital deliverables.
My Role and Collaboration
I worked as a Brand Visual Designer within a cross-functional environment, partnering closely with Marketing and Product stakeholders and coordinating with external vendors to keep the identity consistent as the volume and variety of deliverables expanded.
I owned:
Translating brand strategy into a cohesive visual identity system.
Creating the brand style guides (typography, layout, iconography, illustration usage, do/don’t examples).
Establishing and evolving the photography style and building a photo library.
Designing and delivering brand assets across web, campaigns, social, presentations, and events.
Managing brand asset libraries and ensuring consistency across photography and illustration.
How I partnered:
Collaborated with Product Design and Marketing to align on where the brand should feel expressive vs. restrained.
Worked with stakeholders to review, refine, and standardize reusable patterns.
Directed external vendors with clear briefs and guardrails to maintain quality and consistency.
Approach
Define the foundations, then make them usable
Rebranding isn’t finished when the identity is approved—it’s finished when teams can apply it consistently at speed. To scale a brand in real production conditions, the system needed two things: strong fundamentals and practical guidance. I focused on ensuring the identity had clear rules—then translating those rules into assets, templates, and style guides that teams could apply consistently across channels without constant oversight.
Key decisions
Prioritize clarity and trust through strong hierarchy and disciplined layouts.
Define consistent rules for typography, spacing, and imagery so assets didn’t drift.
Build reusable templates for the most common formats to reduce one-offs.
Document everything in style guides so execution stayed consistent across teams.
Logomark narrative: “Up and to the right” progress, reinforcing forward financial momentum.
The System
Brand Style Guides
To operationalize consistency across teams, I created and maintained brand style guides that codified the identity into clear, repeatable rules.
Included guidance such as
Typography hierarchy and usage patterns
Layout and spacing principles
Iconography style rules
Illustration usage guidelines (composition, color usage, scale, placement)
Do/don’t examples to prevent drift
Applying the system
Web & Digital
On web and digital surfaces, I partnered with Marketing and Product Design to ensure the Achieve rebrand translated into a cohesive, modern experience—consistent hierarchy, disciplined layouts, and a unified approach to imagery. We aligned on repeatable page patterns (hero, value props, proof points, explainer modules, CTAs) so the brand could scale across landing pages and campaigns without becoming a collection of one-offs.
This collaboration supported fast iteration while protecting quality: reusable modules, clear rules for typography and spacing, and consistent QA to ensure the experience stayed on-brand across breakpoints.
Presentations & Narrative Storytelling
Presentations were a high-leverage channel for telling the Achieve story clearly—aligning leadership and cross-functional teams, explaining products and programs, and supporting campaign narratives. I worked with partners to translate the Achieve identity into a deck system with consistent hierarchy, layout rhythm, and reusable slide patterns so decks could be produced quickly without visual drift.
By standardizing core slide types—openers, dividers, explainers, and proof points—teams could create new narratives faster while keeping a cohesive Achieve voice across contributors and use cases.
Campaigns, Social, and High-Visibility Moments
As the Achieve rebrand rolled out, campaigns and social became the fastest-moving proof point of the new identity. The work had to land consistently across high-volume formats—paid and organic social, lifecycle moments, and campaign toolkits—while still leaving enough flexibility for different messages, audiences, and placements. I partnered with Marketing stakeholders to translate the brand standards into repeatable creative patterns (headline hierarchy, layout behavior, imagery treatment, CTA conventions) so assets could be produced quickly without becoming a collection of one-offs.
High-visibility moments raised the bar even further: the brand needed to hold up at scale and in public-facing placements where clarity, craft, and consistency are non-negotiable. I ensured the Achieve system carried cleanly into large-format executions by applying disciplined typography, strong hierarchy, and brand-consistent composition—so the identity felt unmistakably Achieve whether viewed on a phone screen or at distance in a major placement.
Evolving the Brand (Later System Additions)
As Achieve matured, additional systems were introduced to support new storytelling needs and increase production efficiency. This included expanding structured libraries (such as illustration/iconography) as the brand’s touchpoints and content demands grew.
Vendor Direction and Asset Governance
To protect consistency as the system scaled, I managed brand asset libraries and partnered with vendors using clear briefs and review checkpoints. Keeping assets organized and standards documented reduced drift and helped teams execute faster with confidence.
Outcomes
Cohesive rollout of the Achieve rebrand across major touchpoints, replacing fragmented legacy branding.
Increased consistency and speed through reusable patterns, templates, and brand style guides.
A scalable foundation that supported ongoing growth and new channel demands without sacrificing craft.
