TPG
THE ROLE
I was told what to post, not how to post it. The design was in my hands — the direction came from above, the execution and the visual judgment were mine.
Approvals were quick: I finished a piece, my lead signed off, it went out. Anything unusual or high-stakes waited for the co-founder, who I worked with closely.
REFRESHING THE VISUAL IDENTITY
The digital presence was in bad shape when I arrived — the Instagram account especially. There was a brand manual, but a loose one, which is its own kind of problem: enough rules to constrain you, not enough to guide you.
I worked inside it while bringing a fresher visual style, so the brand system stayed coherent while the output became genuinely more attractive. Nothing I made broke the existing identity, and nothing looked like the material published before I arrived either.
DESIGNING FOR VOLUME
The output was relentless: two weekly product magazines of six items each, two single-product pieces a day, around fifteen monthly promotional flyers across stories and print, plus product launch videos, giveaway posts, and thumbnails for everything.
Nothing at that cadence survives being hand-made, so systematising wasn't best practice — it was the only way the volume was physically possible.
I built templates for the recurring formats: product pieces carrying photo, price, palette and details, and the promotional layouts for the "3+1" and "5+1" offers.
THE PRODUCT PHOTO LIBRARY
Alongside the design work, the source material needed fixing. Product photography was pixelated, badly lit and inconsistently sized, and some products had no image at all — which caps how good any layout built on top of it can be.
The catalogue runs to around 9,000 products. Over the year I updated roughly 2,000 of them, standardising resolution, brightness, shadow and scale so the pieces using them finally matched. It was a slow background task rather than the bulk of the job.
Designed in Illustrator, mostly A3, taken to the print shop and brought back to the office myself — press-ready file prep and dealing with the printer directly included.
The building's street-facing billboard was a layout job: around twenty supplier logos I requested by email, arranged on a blank artboard and sent to the signage shop, who produced and mounted the 3D letters.
WHAT THE WORK CAN AND CAN'T PROVE
The templates are still in use at a company I no longer work for. A system that outlives the designer who made it is the outcome I'd point to first.
I also have the before-and-after: what TPG was publishing before I arrived, and what the account looked like after.
I'm deliberately not leading with engagement numbers. I have likes, comments and views from my time there, but the posts that performed best were giveaways and paid ads — so those figures measure prize mechanics and media spend, not design. Quoting them would prove something I didn't do.
REFLECTION
Today I'd do far more research on who TPG actually sells to — restaurant owners, pasta shops, any gastronomic business. I knew roughly who they were, but I could know much more: how they think, what they look for, what they value, why they choose TPG, and why they don't.
That last question is the one I'd start with now. A year of high-volume output taught me how to keep a system coherent under pressure, but volume answers how much, not for whom.