Ensemble Arts Philly Brand Rollout

Role: Creative Strategist · Project Lead · Brand Steward

Client / Employer: Ensemble Arts Philly

Tools: Ziflow, Basecamp, SharePoint, OneNote, Eisenhower Matrix

Project Overview and Objective

Brought in mid-rollout to extend and operationalize the Ensemble Arts Philly rebrand—an ambitious effort to unify three legacy venues (The Kimmel Center, Miller Theater, and Academy of Music) under a singular brand identity. In addition to directing the brand rollout across print, digital, development, and education touchpoints, I built the organization’s first-ever creative services department from the ground up. This included creating scalable workflows, defining intake and review systems, and establishing new creative operations standards. I led all creative reviews, trained designers on the newly introduced brand system, and served as the key liaison between design, marketing, and executive leadership, ensuring brand consistency, strategic alignment, and long-term adaptability

Strategic Approach

• Embedded the newly launched Ensemble Arts Philly brand across all touchpoints—including development, education, internal communications, and marketing—ensuring alignment between design, messaging, and mission.

• Built the organization’s first-ever creative services department from scratch, defining role clarity, project intake systems, and foundational workflow documentation.

• Applied creative problem-solving to address brand “firsts” (e.g., unknown applications or unclear use cases), providing scalable solutions that formalized future expectations.

• Introduced traffic prioritization using the Eisenhower Matrix, creating a transparent system to classify and manage creative workload organization-wide.

• Provided mentorship and oversight for in-house designers, conducting brand fidelity reviews and developing systems for continuous improvement.

Outcomes

• Launched a formal Creative Services lifecycle system, defining every stage and serving as a foundation for future scaling.

• Replaced fragmented feedback by implementing Ziflow, improving collaboration and clarity across stakeholder feedback.

• Led the platform migration from Basecamp 2 to 4, designing a scalable architecture that improved visibility, collaboration, and institutional memory.

Leadership and Collaboration

• Primary creative liaison between C-level leadership and the design team.

• Standardized processes across departments, aligning expectations, timelines, and outputs for creative requests.

• Mentored in-house designers on the new brand framework, including visual language, voice and tone, and production best practices.