Storyteq, Creative Automation Platform
Storyteq: turning a merger’s loose ends into one platform
Sole designer and UX researcher across three product areas born from a company merger: an AI-powered automation studio, a first-class digital asset manager, and a brand guidelines platform built from scratch.
- Scope
- UX/UI, 0→1 product design
- Role
- Sole designer + UX researcher
- Client
- Storyteq
- Year
- Add year
- Status
- Shipped
Background
One platform, stitched from two companies
Storyteq had just merged two products into one. Every client still felt the seam: inconsistent brand identity across the platform, disconnected tools, and an automation process that took clients 83 minutes to turn a single asset into a full set of animated HTML banners. My job spanned three fronts at once: bring the two companies’ identities together into one design language, fix the automation bottleneck, and give the platform’s assets a proper home.
Process
How the work was phased
Discover
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Watched a live automation session and visited brand departments to see how they actually worked.
Define
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Isolated the AI editing step as the real bottleneck, scoped the DAM and Brand Portal as distinct projects.
Design
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Built the shared UI kit, the AI editing studio, the DAM and the Brand Portal.
Deliver
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Shipped the automation fix, sold the DAM standalone, and launched the Brand Portal.
Research
Watching where the time actually went
Before redesigning anything, I needed to see exactly where the automation process was losing time, and how brand teams actually worked day to day, not how account handling assumed they worked.
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Automation sessions observed live
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Brand department visits
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Client test group members
Problems identified
What was actually going wrong
An 83-minute bottleneck no one had isolated
Clients spent 83 minutes turning one asset into a full set of animated HTML banners, and account handling had folded every complaint about it into one generic issue.
Two brand identities living side by side
The recent merger left two companies’ guidelines unreconciled, so the platform still looked and felt like two products stitched together.
Assets with no single home
Images, videos and other assets were created and stored, but the tools around them, editing, print, sharing, review, lived apart from each other.
Brand teams with no shared playbook
Brand departments had no personalised home for their guidelines, org structure or documentation, and no consistent way to bring new files in.
Representative of feedback patterns described in research and retrospectives, written to reflect the theme, not verbatim quotes from named individuals.
“I don’t know why this took so long, I just needed one banner set.”
Client feedback, paraphrased
“Our brand guidelines live in five different places. Nobody’s sure which one is current.”
Brand team feedback, paraphrased
Who this was for
Two different users, two different needs
Brand Manager
Owns brand consistency
- A single personalised home for guidelines and org structure
- Easy distribution of new brand files to teams
- Confidence the platform reflects two merged identities as one
Creative Producer
Ships the assets
- Fast turnaround on animated banners and creative sets
- One tool for editing, automation and review, not several
- Trust that automation output is accurate before it ships
Key decisions
Problem, decision, outcome
Final design
What I designed
0→1 product
An AI editing studio
Designed a dedicated studio for image generation, masking, cutout and animation, sitting at the exact point in the workflow where time was disappearing, plus the auto-detection tooling that fed it.
Systems design
A first-class DAM
Rebuilt asset management as a proper product in its own right: image editing, print services, automation, animation, sharing and review all living in one place instead of scattered across the platform.
0→1 product
A Brand Portal from scratch
Built a Zero Height-style home for brand guidelines: automated document creation, org structures, and a personalised, almost Netflix-like experience per brand.
Cross-team bridge
One design language, two dev teams
Acted as the connective layer between two product and engineering teams that had never worked from the same system before, in both design and delivery.
Edge cases
Constraints that shaped the decisions
Constraint
Account handling had already grouped every complaint into one generic issue
Response: diagnosed the automation problem by area myself, live in a real session, rather than trusting the existing categorisation.
Constraint
Two development teams inherited from a merger, running on different foundations
Response: built one shared UI kit in Figma and Storybook both teams could work from without a re-platform.
Constraint
Real clients, real revenue, no room for a broken rollout
Response: validated every change with a genuine client test group before it went out platform-wide.
Trade-offs
What I chose not to do
We didn’t rebuild automation infrastructure from scratch
Once the AI editing step was fixed, further infrastructure change wasn’t worth the disruption to a live client base.
We didn’t unify the merged companies’ entire tech stack at once
Brand and UI cohesion came first. Deeper platform consolidation was left for later phases.
Outcome
Where the numbers landed
Business impact
83 → 10 min
Banner production time, down from the original process
Product
2
Enterprise clients buying the DAM standalone (Heineken, Clarks)
Adoption
3
Flagship platform clients (GSK, Puma, WWE)
DAM sold standalone to Heineken and Clarks. Platform clients included GSK, Puma, WWE.
Testimonials
“Add a quote here from a colleague or client about working with you on Storyteq.”
Name, Title, Storyteq
“Add a second quote here, if you have one.”
Name, Title, Storyteq
Reflection
What I learned
Cohesion beats features
The biggest wins didn’t come from adding capability, they came from making three disconnected products feel like one.
Diagnose before you redesign
The fastest fix wasn’t a redesign, it was watching one session and finding the single step actually costing the time.
Skills demonstrated
More work