Canopy Cloud, Enterprise Print Platform
Canopy Cloud: carrying a two-year rebuild to the finish
Lead designer on an enterprise platform for print and large campaign management, picking up a director’s initial direction and carrying it through to a shipped, modern product.
- Scope
- UX/UI, enterprise workflow
- Role
- Lead designer
- Client
- Canopy Cloud
- Year
- Add year
- Status
- Shipped
Background
Everything a print campaign needs, never in one place
Canopy Cloud existed to give agencies one system for brand rules, briefs, timesheets, cost tracking, purchase tracking, print production and review, for campaigns running at billboard scale. The direction had been set by my director; my job was to take it, make it real for the people actually using it, and see it through to completion.
Process
How the work was phased
Discover
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Ran persona-based interviews across account, brand and delivery teams.
Define
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Identified that each role needed its own surface, not one shared dashboard.
Design
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Built dedicated briefing, DAM and time-tracking surfaces around each job.
Deliver
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Shipped a modernised platform for GSK, Heineken and Sky over two years.
Research
Researching like a designer, not an analyst
Coming from a graphic design background myself, I ran research that mirrored how client teams actually thought about their work, briefing, costs, timesheets, not just what the interface needed to display.
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Persona interviews across account, brand and delivery teams
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Stakeholder review calls
2 years
Continuous iteration, start to ship
Problems identified
What was actually going wrong
Campaign data scattered across the process
Brand rules, briefs, timesheets, costs, purchase tracking and print review all lived apart, so agencies had no single place to manage a campaign.
A direction inherited mid-flight
My director had set the initial direction, but two years of enterprise stakeholders and shifting priorities meant that direction had to keep proving itself.
Generic screens for very different jobs
Account teams briefing a campaign, brand teams managing assets, and delivery teams tracking time all needed something built around their specific job, not a shared generic dashboard.
Representative of feedback patterns described in research and retrospectives, written to reflect the theme, not verbatim quotes from named individuals.
“I have to check three different tools just to know if a job’s on track.”
Account team feedback, paraphrased
“Timesheets take longer to fill in than the actual work.”
Delivery team feedback, paraphrased
Who this was for
Two different users, two different needs
Account Handler
Scopes the campaign
- A fast, task-based way to brief a new campaign
- Visibility into cost and purchase tracking as the brief evolves
- One system instead of juggling separate tools per client
Delivery / Ops Staff
Runs day to day
- A lightweight way to log time without breaking their workflow
- Clear visibility into print production and review status
- Tools that fit their job, not a generic shared dashboard
Key decisions
Problem, decision, outcome
Final design
What I designed
Workflow design
Briefing, built for GSK
A task-based briefing flow that matched how GSK’s teams actually scoped and handed off campaign work.
DAM
Asset management for Heineken
A dedicated digital asset manager sitting inside the same platform as briefing, costs and print tracking.
Ops tooling
Time tracking for Sky
A lightweight timesheet experience for delivery colleagues, built to sit alongside cost and purchase tracking rather than as a bolt-on tool.
Continuity
A two-year through-line
Held one coherent product vision across two years of iteration, stakeholders and shifting priorities.
Edge cases
Constraints that shaped the decisions
Constraint
A direction already set by someone else before I joined
Response: protected the parts already working for clients while modernising everything else around them.
Constraint
Enterprise stakeholders across GSK, Heineken and Sky, each with different priorities
Response: designed each surface around one specific job rather than trying to satisfy every stakeholder with one shared screen.
Constraint
Two years is long enough for priorities to shift more than once
Response: kept one coherent product vision as the throughline, even as individual features moved around it.
Trade-offs
What I chose not to do
We didn’t redesign every legacy screen at once
Modernising everything simultaneously risked destabilising a system enterprise clients depended on daily.
We didn’t restart from scratch despite an inherited direction
Rebuilding everything would have cost more time than refining what already worked.
Outcome
What shipped after two years
Timeline
2 years
From inherited direction to a fully shipped product
Clients
3
Enterprise clients built for (GSK, Heineken, Sky)
Scope
3
Core modules shipped (briefing, DAM, time tracking)
Built for GSK, Heineken, Sky.
Testimonials
“Add a quote here from a colleague or client about working with you on Canopy Cloud.”
Name, Title, Canopy Cloud
“Add a second quote here, if you have one.”
Name, Title, Canopy Cloud
Reflection
What I learned
Inherited work needs its own kind of care
Carrying someone else’s direction for two years meant protecting what worked as much as fixing what didn’t.
Research your own way in
My design background wasn’t separate from the research, it was the way in.
Skills demonstrated
More work