Coles — System-led Design at Scale
Some of the most meaningful impact came from improving systems alongside day-to-day design execution.
Role: Digital Content Artist
Focus: Design quality, system-led execution, large-scale delivery
Overview
Coles operates within a large, highly governed digital ecosystem supporting high-volume marketing and content delivery. Design decisions must balance brand consistency, accessibility, speed, and technical constraints across multiple teams and channels.
In my role, I work at the intersection of design execution and system adherence, ensuring outputs remain clear, consistent, and fit-for-purpose at scale — while identifying opportunities to improve quality within existing frameworks.
Context & Constraints
In a mature, highly governed environment, many challenges are systemic rather than visual, requiring restraint, judgement, and incremental improvement.
The Challenge
Two recurring challenges stood out. While individually small, these issues affected perceived quality and user experience at scale. Rather than pursuing large redesigns, my focus was on identifying small, high-leverage improvements within existing systems.
• Designing Flybuys eDMs that remained clear, accessible, and effective within rigid templates
• Maintaining image quality across web surfaces where assets were frequently upscaled or inconsistently sized
My approach focused on making small, high-leverage improvements within existing systems rather than attempting large-scale redesigns.
Flybuys eDM Design
Flybuys eDMs were a high-volume, high-visibility output where small system decisions had a disproportionate impact on clarity and accessibility.
System Adoption & Quality Uplift
When Flybuys eDM production transitioned from an external agency to in-house delivery, I supported the shift by establishing clear design structure and quality standards within existing constraints.
Rather than redesigning eDMs from scratch, my focus was on interpreting and maintaining design intent, ensuring layouts met accessibility, hierarchy, and mobile-first readability expectations as they moved into internal workflows. As the team adopted Figma, I recreated a set of lightweight, reusable eDM modules to support consistency and efficiency, while full component ownership remained with the external agency.
This work helped lift overall design quality, reduce visual noise, and make eDM production more sustainable and scalable within governance and turnaround constraints.
Improving Image Quality & Performance
Internal Initiative
While working across web content, I noticed recurring image quality issues caused by assets being scaled beyond their supplied size. Rather than treating this as a compression issue or applying one-off fixes, I chose to address the root cause by aligning design templates with real display contexts.
Rather than treating this as a one-off fix, I reviewed live display contexts, compared supplied sizes against rendered dimensions, and highlighted where upscaling was occurring. Based on this, I proposed updated artboard sizes and export guidance that better aligned with real usage, while remaining mindful of performance constraints and existing delivery workflows.
This initiative helped improve visual clarity across high-traffic banners and content cards, while creating a shared understanding between design and delivery teams around image sizing, quality, and performance trade-offs.
