Laura Busche · Brand Design Lead
Brand identity systems, creative direction, web design, packaging, and design leadership, built across startups, nonprofits, and global brands.
Brand Identity System & Campaign Design
Evolved the Creative Market brand into "Destination Design," a scalable system across thousands of creators, categories, and touchpoints. Defined rules around typography, color roles, layout, and brand tone. Created flexible marketing components for merchandising and campaigns that team members could recombine by context. Also led the original 2016 wordmark redesign.
Campaign Visual System
Flexible campaign components, from homepage merchandising to seasonal trend content, designed for recombination across contexts without losing brand coherence.
Brand Figma Library & Illustration System
Unified a fragmented brand across product and marketing by building a shared Figma library: updated components, typography rules, color usage, and a refreshed illustration system. Both teams used the library as a source of truth, resulting in stronger cohesion and improved trial-to-conversion performance.
Brand Identity System & Campaign Design
Defined a cohesive brand system for a parent brand with 5 sub-brands: logo variations, typography, color palettes, graphic elements. Creative directed social campaigns, podcast visual identity, conference branding, and ad design. Built social media design guidelines so internal teams could produce on-brand content consistently.
Brand Identity & Website Creative Direction
After a comprehensive brand audit, crafted a fresh visual identity for this Canadian game studio with 250M+ downloads across 100+ mobile games. The new Magmic is bold and minimal, polished and playful. Creative directed and designed the website from wireframes through Figma handoff.
City Brand Identity
Built a brand identity, story, applications, and website for the city of Santa Marta, Colombia. Created a Brand Book covering symbol, color, typography, illustration, and imagery usage, designed for multiple stakeholders across tourism, government, and local business. Also directed a photoshoot for a social-ready image library.
Social Media Design & Creative Direction
Designed social graphics following UNICEF's brand guidelines: flexible styles for quotes, human interest stories, facts, and fundraising campaigns. Creative directed visual campaigns for a global audience, translating complex social issues into clear graphic narratives in 5 languages.
Content Creative Direction
Led creative content direction at the world's largest design community. Designed a content strategy playbook and managed the brand's visual presence during the launch of Dribbble Learn. Coordinated live social events and managed a team of content contractors. Led design curation and visual trend reporting.
Branded Social Template System
Created branded social media template systems, web assets, and campaign materials. Templates were designed so non-designers could produce on-brand posts without starting from scratch or waiting for design review.
Seasonal Campaign Design & Ad Creative
Forecasted and selected a Color of the Season to reinforce the brand's voice in visual culture. Curated products and developed content for quarterly campaigns. Also creative directed general brand campaigns including "Explore the world's marketplace for design" and seasonal trend reports.
Landing Pages & Product Launch Visuals
Designed landing pages in Figma from core brand assets: layouts, illustrations, and interactions for product launches including Polaris (AI clinical search), DermToolkit, Derm2Derm community forum, and Patient Access Management Summit event pages.
Website Redesign & Brand Component Library
Infused the brand with the energy of the DTC Shopify space: bolder colors, geometric accents, minimalistic technical illustrations. Crafted the homepage, pricing page, case studies hub, and product pages from wireframes through Figma handoff. Site refreshed in phases, building on the shared component library.
Website Creative Direction & Figma Designs
The new magmic.com conveys the possibilities of web3 and the metaverse while celebrating the brand's 18-year gaming legacy. Crafted from wireframes to Figma handoff, including homepage, games catalog, individual game pages, about, careers, and a reusable component system.
Content Hub Redesign
Led the redesign of Brush Up, Creative Market's content hub. Defined visual language, page layouts, category structure, and article templates; a system flexible enough for diverse content types while remaining unmistakably on-brand.
Website Design & Brand Style Guide
Digital Knack (now DK Recruiting) is an LA-based recruiting firm. Designed their website to convey can-do energy and a humanist approach. From wireframes through Figma handoff, including a component set and streamlined brand style guide.
Single-Page Web Redesigns
Development-ready Figma layouts based on existing style guides for Cheddar Up (payments) and Ozone's StellarBrandClub (social and web design subscription).
Brand Identity Refresh & Brand Book
Refreshed the brand identity for this NJ-based law firm to appeal to a younger, bilingual audience. Clean typography paired with a light geometric mark that conveys clarity. Full brand book covering logo, typography, color system, stationery, and application guidelines.
Brand Identity, Packaging & Social Styling
Goelkel is an accessory brand inspired by ancestry, fair trade, and local materials. Created packaging labels and a brand identity system with an artisanal sensibility, extending across product tags, shopping bags, gift cards, and social media styling.
Brand Identity, Packaging & B2B Sales Collateral
Brand identity for a Colombian woodworking company with roots dating back to 1958. Heritage meets modernity through a geometric "M" mark, natural material textures, and a muted, sophisticated color palette.
Brand Identity System, Nonprofit Visual Design
Complete brand system for the American Immigrant Investor Alliance, a nonprofit advocating for EB-5 visa investors. Color palette, typographic scheme, wordmark, and minimal marks designed to feel institutional and trustworthy while remaining approachable.
Brand Identity & Packaging Design, Nonprofit
Nonprofit focused on clearing beaches from plastic pollution. Created packaging and brand identity pro bono. Visual language drawing on ocean tones and organic forms to connect the product experience to the environmental mission.
Brand Identity & Packaging Label Design
Specialty Colombian coffee and chocolate brand for Caribbean and US markets. Brand identity system honoring the origin story: coffee bean mark, warm earth-toned palette, and organic pattern illustrations inspired by Caribbean plant life.
Logo & Packaging Design
Brand Audit, Voice & Personality Framework
Brand audit and content playbook that resonated with core personas. Developed a differentiated brand personality and voice as a foundation for verbal and visual communications. Became a shared reference for content creators and contractors.
Brand Audit & Messaging Framework
Brand content playbook defining distinctive voice, personality, and messaging to strengthen awareness and adoption. Simplified personas into actionable archetypes with tone guidelines the broader marketing team could apply independently.
Brand Book & Illustration System
Comprehensive Brand Book with a documented illustration system based on artisanal crafts, detailed logo usage, and governance guidelines. Designed for government, tourism, and local business stakeholders to maintain consistency at scale.
Brand Audit & Redesign Analysis
Multiple rounds of brand audits for Newstex, a provider of news and commentary about emerging trends. Delivered actionable insights and sample components for a two-sided marketplace brand needing clearer differentiation between publisher and platform audiences.
Brand Guideline Documents
Concise single-page references distilling essential brand rules (logo, color, typography, tone, values) into a format anyone on the team can pin to their wall or keep in a tab. Shown: Scura, Creative Market, and Dermsquared.
AI-Powered Brand Intelligence Tool
Designed and built an AI-powered tool that turns everything a brand knows about itself into a single structured markdown file that any AI agent can read and act on. Born from a Smashing Magazine article, "The Case for Brand Systems." Through a 7-module questionnaire, it generates a machine-readable .md file that drops into Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Figma, or any MCP-connected tool.
AI-Augmented Creative Strategy
A customer-language-first ad framework that mines real five-star reviews for the exact words and emotions buyers use, then translates them into 10 platform-ready ad concepts with headlines, creative direction, and targeting strategy.
Monthly Competitive Intelligence Report
Monthly report scanning direct competitors for product launches, promotions, and merchandising tactics, distilled into patterns and implications the team can act on immediately. Each edition compounds into a rolling pattern library. Based on a tool from my Brand Psychology book.
Automated Brand Quality Assurance System
Automated system that intercepts test email sends before they reach subscribers, running multi-point inspection across rendering, copy, accessibility, links, compliance, and marketing effectiveness. Produces scannable reports; a single source of truth on what to fix before it touches a customer's inbox.
Cross-Channel Brand Campaign Coordination
Multi-channel overview of brand moments keeping email, ad, affiliate, social, and content teams in sync. Briefs built in Notion with Slack integration, giving full team visibility into what's shipping, when, and on which channel.
Thought Leadership on Brand Strategy
Three books forming a complete framework: how people psychologically connect with brands (Brand Psychology, Routledge), how to build brand identities iteratively under real constraints (Lean Branding, O'Reilly, foreworded by Eric Ries), and how to power the content engine that keeps a brand alive (Powering Content, O'Reilly). Used in university programs, startup accelerators, and by practitioners worldwide.
3,853 Students · 100% Positive Reviews
"Content Strategy: Build Your Brand from Scratch" walks through building a content playbook from brand foundations through editorial calendar and distribution.
Brand Communication Strategy
Instructor for "Lean Branding: 15 Hacks to Create Your Startup's Brand" and "How to Repurpose Content Across Multiple Platforms."
Amsterdam, Netherlands
10 practical tactics for building high-converting, dynamic brands, from brand storyboarding and word association to visual audits and A/B testing symbols, grounded in consumer psychology research behind Lean Branding.
Helsinki, Finland
10 actionable tactics for startups to create, communicate, and sell their brand. Making brand-building feel approachable and evidence-based for teams working with real constraints.
Goodtype, Online
Practical hacks to accelerate design workflows: building brand-consistent libraries, smarter template systems, scene creators, and client portals. Helping designers remove friction so they can focus on the creative work that matters.
Colombia
8-week brand design workshop for 300+ entrepreneurs in the Apps.co tech startup acceleration program, teaching founders how to build brand identities from strategy through visual execution.
Career Pathing for Designers
Career growth guide for the path toward Senior Graphic Designer. Competency areas (sharp visual taste, strategic thinking, marketplace fluency, leadership presence), curated learning resources, and concrete action steps.
Design Workflow Documentation
Thorough handoff document for designers managing workflows, assets, and deliverables within UNICEF. Brand application guidance, Trello-based workflow documentation, Slack integration protocols, and asset management standards.