Visual first: How design-driven brands are outperforming competitors

I hosted a Canva webinar recently where we brought together brand leaders from Ricoh, Exos, and Canva to dig into one big truth: brands that prioritize visual design as a strategic function—not as an afterthought—win. In the session I led, I walked through concrete tactics, real-world examples, and practical playbooks for transforming your organization into a visual-first machine. What follows is my report from that conversation: a synthesis of what Lubnauba Aspah (Ricoh), Scott Birchman (Exos), Benny (Canva solutions consulting), and I discussed, plus the operational and measurement advice you can start using right now.

This is written in a conversational, no-fluff style. I’ll tell you what works, why it works, and how to actually ship it in the real world where teams are busy, budgets are finite, and stakeholders have opinions. I’m writing this as someone who ran the conversation and who has seen the same problems at dozens of organizations: random acts of marketing, design teams buried in requests, brand equity that’s more aspirational than operational, and the rising pressure to get more content, faster, for more audiences. If you care about brand performance, creative ops, or turning employees into authentic brand storytellers, read on.

🔍 What “visual first” means—and why it matters
🎨 Design vs “pretty”: The difference that changes outcomes
👥 Employees as brand storytellers (internal brand matters)
⛔ What blocks teams from becoming visual-first (and how to remove the blocks)
🧭 From brand police to brand enablers: a roadmap
⚙️ Tools, templates, and the operational toolbox
🤖 AI in creative: what’s real today and how to use it
📈 Real-world business impact: metrics you can use
🧾 How to plan a refresh or rebrand without chaos
🔁 Design systems: rules that are flexible, not brittle
🚀 Getting started: a practical 90-day sprint
📣 Measurement framework: what to track and why
📚 Examples that prove the point
🧠 Practical tips for leaders: what I’d do this week
🗞️ A brief “news” roundup: what’s changing in visual marketing
❓ FAQ: Answering the most common questions I heard
📌 Closing: design as a business lever, not just a checkbox
🔁 Quick reference checklist (copy & use)
📣 Final note

🔍 What “visual first” means—and why it matters

When people say “visual first,” they usually mean something like “make things pretty.” That’s the easy misunderstanding. What I’ve learned—and what the leaders I spoke with modeled—is that being visual first is strategic. It’s about embedding design as a core part of how your company tells stories, makes decisions, and shows up across every touchpoint.

Here’s how I define it: a visual-first brand builds a recognizable, consistent visual design language that’s rooted in its DNA, applied across channels, and used as a tool to drive business outcomes. It’s not decoration; it’s a layer of strategy that amplifies clarity, recall, and emotional connection.

Why this matters: humans process visual stimuli faster and recall visuals better than text. If your brand looks indistinguishable from competitors or from the noise on social platforms, you lose the first, crucial seconds of attention. A strong visual system gives you punch through that noise and makes your message memorable.

🎨 Design vs “pretty”: The difference that changes outcomes

Lubnauba Aspah—who leads brand management and visual design at Ricoh—said something simple and important: design isn’t just about making things look good. It’s about creating a visual system that differentiates your brand and is grounded in who you actually are.

That rings true. Anyone can make a single asset look slick. The strategic lift comes from building a design system that: (a) clarifies a few core visual rules and (b) is applied consistently across every channel. Think about Apple’s minimalist black-and-white aesthetic. It’s not accidental—it's a deliberate visual strategy that’s embedded in every product and campaign.

So when I talk about “design-led strategies,” I mean design as a strategic discipline—where typography choices, color systems, photography style, and layout principles are decisions that serve business goals like recall, conversion, and brand affinity. The output should be recognizable even without the logo.

👥 Employees as brand storytellers (internal brand matters)

One of the most underrated opportunities in brand work is your internal audience. Lubnauba reminded us that Ricoh North America is tens of thousands of employees—and every single one of those people is a potential brand ambassador. When you change your visual identity or refresh your design language, you don’t just change ads—you change how employees talk about the company, how they feel about it, and how they share it in their networks.

Scott Birchman at Exos had the same experience after a brand refresh: getting internal buy-in matters as much as public messaging. When employees understand and feel proud of a brand shift, they amplify it across channels with authenticity you can’t buy.

Moral: if you’re planning a refresh or a campaign, include internal comms, training, and lightweight toolkits so internal teams can use the new visuals confidently. That’ll multiply your reach and cut down on inconsistent, off-brand content coming from inside the house.

⛔ What blocks teams from becoming visual-first (and how to remove the blocks)

In an ideal world, creative teams would have uninterrupted blocks of time and a single, clear queue of strategic work. In reality, creative teams get pulled into meetings, tactical requests, and never-ending context switching. Scott called this out plainly: creatives don't like task switching. When they’re interrupted, quality and speed suffer.

Here’s the practical fixset we discussed and the actions I recommend you adopt immediately:

Protect creative flow time: assign meeting-free blocks and protect them. Lubnauba inspects calendars and pushes back on unnecessary meetings. Do the same. Create a weekly status meeting and then let creatives focus for the rest of the week. It produces far higher quality than constant firefighting.
Give structured “play” time: Lubnauba gives her team four hours each month to explore—go to a gallery, read a non-marketing book, or just fiddle with new tools. She brings the team back every other month to show what inspired them. This fuels creativity and reduces the narrowness that comes from living inside templates.
Reduce pointless reviews: set clear decision makers and a documented review cadence. Don’t invite ten stakeholders to see a concept simultaneously. Decide who signs off and who is consultative.
Use templates and guardrails: democratize low-stakes creative with templates. That reduces the tiny requests that clog creative teams and frees them for high-value work.

🧭 From brand police to brand enablers: a roadmap

Historically, brand teams acted like “brand police”—blocking off-brand uses and policing assets. The smarter approach now is to shift from policing to enabling. That’s what Benny and the Canva team do with enterprise customers: they put brand systems inside tools and create self-serve templates so non-designers can create on-brand content quickly.

Here’s the roadmap I follow when I advise teams to move from policing to enabling:

Audit the most frequent requests: list the 20 most common creative asks that your team receives. Those are candidates for templates and automation.
Raise the floor, not lower the bar: design templates should ensure layout, hierarchy, and legal approvals are baked in—giving non-designers a clean, good-looking starting point without diluting brand quality.
Train “trainers” and advocates: start with a pilot group of power users in the field who get training, office hours, and a fast feedback loop to your creative team.
Provide a brand portal: approved assets, editable templates, and usage guidance must live somewhere accessible.
Measure and adjust: collect requests that still need design team support and iterate on templates accordingly.

Scott described how Exos used Canva to replace random Slide decks from the field. The result? A consistent set of templates that kept the Exos look intact while still allowing local teams to adapt messaging. That’s a classic win: consistency + flexibility.

⚙️ Tools, templates, and the operational toolbox

Let me be blunt: your creative system is not only about fonts and photo styles. It’s also operational. The cadence for briefs, the template library, rights-managed imagery, and the governance model are the hard parts. Benny’s team at Canva helps clients put the brand system into the platform so it’s accessible, versioned, and trackable.

Practical components I recommend you assemble:

Brand portal with approved assets: logos, color palette, typography files, photo style guides, and pre-approved copy blocks.
Editable templates: for presentations, social, event signage, sales one-pagers, and internal comms.
Pre-approved localizable assets: files that can be printed locally or edited for local markets without breaking brand rules.
Design system documentation: not a single PDF but a living guide that includes examples for video, live events, print, and digital formats.
Training and onboarding: short how-to videos, office hours, and roadshows—teach people to use templates well rather than leaving them to guess.
Feedback loop: an easy intake for "this template needs to be updated" so the design team can prioritize real needs.

If you’re running a global operation, you can’t scale brand control by adding headcount indefinitely. The only way is to automate the mundane and surface templates where the work is happening.

🤖 AI in creative: what’s real today and how to use it

AI isn’t a shiny distraction anymore; it’s already changing how design and marketing teams work. During our conversation I heard three real, practical AI use cases that you can implement with low friction:

Idea visualization and rapid comps: Lubnauba used DALL·E to create quick, shareable visualizations of an exhibition concept. Instead of describing a bamboo forest and getting blank stares, she generated imagery in minutes to align stakeholders and reduce weeks of costly iterations with an external production partner. That kind of rapid prototyping can save time and budget.
Translation and localization at scale: Benny highlighted a case where Canva’s translation features and bulk content creation reduced localization turnaround from two weeks to within an hour. That’s not just faster; it enables hyper-relevant local campaigns that move markets.
Automation of repetitive tasks: from summarizing long documents to generating variations of headlines and resizing assets, AI can eliminate low-value work and let humans focus on insight and strategy. Lubnauba described using AI to summarize a 28-page eBook, freeing writers to do higher-value creative thinking.

But there’s a human component. Scott’s best point: don’t throw AI at your team and say “figure it out.” Train people, create small experiments, and make AI part of the regular learning curriculum. Scott’s creative director ran a fun internal experiment where team members used tools like Midjourney to turn colleagues into muppets—an exploratory, low-stakes way to build prompt skills and confidence before applying the tech to campaigns.

📈 Real-world business impact: metrics you can use

Talking about brand is one thing; measuring it is another. I made a point during the session that creative work must be tied to ROI from the outset. You can’t optimize what you don’t measure. Here are the measurement lenses we recommended, drawn from actual examples shared on the call:

Turnaround time: How long does it take to localize a campaign? Benny shared a case where translation and bulk creation reduced localization time by ~70%. That time savings translates into faster market entry and better campaign freshness.
Production output: In the same case, output increased by about 15x. Think of this as throughput—how many assets can you produce with the same headcount when you automate repetitive tasks?
Cost savings: the insurance client example generated millions in savings—Benny cited roughly $2M USD in the first year—by cutting redundant manual effort and centralizing templates and translation. This is the kind of number that turns heads in finance.
Engagement & conversion: for digital campaigns, A/B test creatives, CTAs, and formats. Lubnauba recommended baked-in testing in the brief so performance is measured from day one.
Brand health & sentiment: social listening, virality, sentiment, and brand recall matter. Benny pointed out that social platforms double as a testing ground where public sentiment and real-time engagement can inform creative choices.
People outcomes: Scott made an important point that people outcomes—did the team survive the campaign? Did the process burn people out?—are real business metrics. If your process damages morale, you pay for it in turnover and rework.

My advice: pick three numbers to track per campaign. One output metric (assets produced), one business metric (lead conversion or time to localize), and one people/ops metric (hours spent by the creative team). Track them consistently.

🧾 How to plan a refresh or rebrand without chaos

Rebrands are emotionally charged and operationally messy. Scott emphasized early and often stakeholder alignment. You must map people, process, and the decision tree before design begins. If you don’t, someone will veto late and derail months of work.

Here’s the pre-production checklist I recommend when you plan a refresh or a full rebrand:

Audit existing assets: identify legacy pieces, their owners, and their replacement cost. Don’t guess—measure. If UPS or FedEx or another enterprise refreshes, they’re replacing vehicles, packaging, and signage. That’s real money.
Define the scope: are you doing a refresh or a rebrand? Refresh = evolve. Rebrand = rebuild. Scope informs budget and timeline.
Map stakeholders and make the game rules: who will be consulted, who makes decisions, what the sign-off process looks like, and how feedback is collected and actioned?
Collect inspiration: create a mood board and ask stakeholders for brands they admire and why. It’s a simple, clarifying exercise that reduces surprises.
Set up the operations lead: assign somebody to run the project plan, meetings, and approvals. Creative leads create; project leads orchestrate. You need both.
Plan rollout phases: prioritize core assets first (web, sales decks, social), then tackle secondary items (packaging, T-shirts, signage). Don’t flip every asset at once unless you have the budget and runway.
Internal launch and training: make the internal rollout as important as the external one. Give employees templates, quick guides, and a ritualized way to celebrate the new look.

🔁 Design systems: rules that are flexible, not brittle

Design systems fail when they become rigid templates. Lubnauba had a clean way to explain this: a design system should define the minimum to maintain recognition and give maximum flexibility for creative expression. If your design system is a set of rigid boxes that always look identical, it will become stale and designers will hate it.

To build a design system that lasts, consider these elements:

Color system with purpose: choose a palette that offers brights, neutrals, and accents. Don’t pick a single brand color and force it into every application; instead design combos that scale across light and dark backgrounds.
Typography with range: pick a type system that includes multiple weights and styles. Use display weights for headlines, medium weights for body, and reserve italics or caps for specific use-cases. A single-weight font will limit expression.
Photography & illustration rules: define your people photography, still life, and illustration styles. The picture will dominate the layout—choose it carefully. A bad photo ruins a good grid every time.
Motion and video standards: your system should include guidance for motion: how do cuts behave, what is the tone of motion graphics, how do overlays and lower-thirds look?
Templates for channel-specific uses: web hero banners differ from in-event signage. Create channel-specific rules, not one-size-fits-all templates that fail on first use.
Governance & updates: make the system a living document. Allow controlled experiments and have a process for proven exceptions to be folded back into the system.

Lubnauba’s practical rule: an effective design system lets you test small changes that have big impact. A tiny tweak to a calligraphic flourish, a refined color tone, or a better photograph can refresh perception without throwing everything away.

🚀 Getting started: a practical 90-day sprint

If you want to become visual-first but have limited time and budget, run a focused 90-day sprint. Here’s the exact playbook I recommend you use with the team:

Week 1–2: Audit and align: inventory your top 100 assets, map owners, and score each asset for priority (replace, refresh, keep). Get stakeholders aligned on KPIs and scope.
Week 3–4: Quick wins and templates: create 5-7 high-impact templates that solve most of your daily needs: sales deck, event banner, social post, internal announcement, and a one-pager. Put them in a shared portal.
Week 5–6: Training & field pilots: run 2–3 training sessions with field teams, marketing, and sales. Run a pilot with a small set of users and collect feedback.
Week 7–9: Embed AI and iterative automation: identify 1–2 AI automations to test (e.g., translation, headline generation, batch resizing). Run a controlled experiment and measure time saved.
Week 10–12: Measure and scale: collect KPIs: time to localize, asset throughput, creative hours saved, and satisfaction of stakeholders. Adjust templates and expand access based on feedback.

That 90-day sprint doesn’t build a full design system overnight, but it gives you measurable wins and an operational playbook for scaling. Most importantly, it changes behavior: people start to use templates and your creative team can protect time for higher-value work.

📣 Measurement framework: what to track and why

From the conversation I led, three kinds of measurement rose to the top: business, output, and people metrics. Build a dashboard that blends these and use it to justify further investment.

Business metrics: conversions, pipeline influenced, revenue attributed to campaign, time to market.
Output metrics: assets produced per month, localization turnaround time, number of templates used by field teams.
People & process metrics: creative hours saved, stakeholder satisfaction, number of revision rounds per asset, and creative team burnout rate.

When we rolled out KPIs in the webinar discussion, there was a consensus: tie creative KPIs to a business unit objective up front. Put the KPI in the brief. If it’s not in the brief, it’s hard to get credit for the work and impossible to optimize.

📚 Examples that prove the point

Two examples stood out during our discussion and I want to amplify them because they translate directly into action.

1) The insurance client who localized across markets: by implementing a centralized brand system, translation-at-scale, bulk content creation, and automated resizing, that organization reduced localization time by roughly 70%, increased asset production about 15x, and realized approximately $2M USD in savings in the first year. That combination of speed, scale, and cost reduction shows how operational design systems produce measurable business outcomes.

2) Exos rebrand and field enablement: Exos decided to “raise the floor” with templates. Field teams were previously creating random slide decks and ad-hoc flyers. After introducing templates and training, Exos saw more consistent output, fewer design requests for low-stakes assets, and more creative headroom for strategic projects. They also created an operational loop where the field could request new templates when formats changed—keeping the central team in the loop.

🧠 Practical tips for leaders: what I’d do this week

If you read nothing else, do these five things this week. I promise they'll move the needle.

Run a 20-minute audit: list the top 10 repeat requests your creative team handled last month. These are templating candidates.
Block creative time: protect at least one 3-hour block per week for each creative to do deep work. Enforce it—no status calls during that time.
Set up one brand portal page: pick one place people can always find the most used logo and one template. Make it accessible internally.
Pick an AI pilot: choose a single task to automate—translations, resizing, or summarizing—and run a 30-day experiment. Measure time saved.
Ask for people feedback post-campaign: run a 10-question post-mortem that covers process, outcomes, and team health. Use it to adjust how you work next time.

🗞️ A brief “news” roundup: what’s changing in visual marketing

Here’s what I’m seeing across industries and what you should watch for:

Hyper-personalized creatives: brands are moving from one-size-fits-all to campaign templates that support tailored messaging for sub-audiences. AI makes it cheaper to produce variants, which in turn boosts relevance and conversion.
Design systems living in tools: more brands are embedding systems inside the creative platforms used by stakeholders—so brand rules travel to where the work happens, not the other way around.
People-first measurement: companies are starting to track internal outcomes (time saved, satisfaction) alongside business metrics to justify creative investments.
AI as augmentation, not replacement: teams that win use AI to automate repetition and accelerate ideation, while humans keep final editorial judgment, strategy, and empathy.

❓ FAQ: Answering the most common questions I heard

How do I stop “random acts of marketing” without killing local autonomy?

Give people templates and guardrails, not restrictions. Use a portal where field teams can pick a template, swap messaging, and produce materials without design signoff. Reserve full brand signoff for high-impact assets (national campaigns, product launches).

How do I measure the ROI of a visual refresh?

Start with the KPIs connected to the business unit the refresh serves. Track time-to-localize, asset throughput, conversions, and cost savings from reduced external agency work. Tie business outcomes (leads, pipeline) back to campaign assets when possible. Also track people outcomes like hours saved and stakeholder satisfaction.

What’s the first tool I should adopt for scaling design?

If you don’t have a brand portal and editable template library today, prioritize that. Many teams use platform solutions (like Canva Enterprise) to centralize templates and assets. The actual tool matters less than whether you can control brand assets and permissions, provide templates, and measure usage.

How much design system rigidity is too much?

If your system is a checklist of rigid visual boxes that produces identical outputs across channels, it’s too rigid. Your system should protect brand recognition but allow variation in layouts, color combinations, and photo styles to stay fresh. Define non-negotiables (logo usage, primary color palette) and then provide flexible modules for everything else.

How should I introduce AI without overwhelming the team?

Run small, fun experiments that build skills. Start with a non-critical prompt exercise or a single-use case (e.g., summarizing a long report). Provide monthly office hours or a quick internal training. Assign an AI champion to collect use cases and share wins—this lowers anxiety and grows practical know-how.

What’s a realistic internal adoption timeline?

Expect a 90–180 day visible change for template usage and process improvements. Full adoption and cultural embedding—where teams routinely use templates, rely on the portal, and feel empowered—often takes 6–12 months depending on scale.

📌 Closing: design as a business lever, not just a checkbox

Design isn’t an optional layer that you add at the finish line. In organizations that treat design as a strategic, operational discipline, visual-first thinking becomes a multiplier: faster time to market, more consistent brand recall, better internal alignment, and often measurable cost savings. The examples and tactics in this write-up come directly from practitioners doing this work—Lubnauba Aspah at Ricoh, Scott Birchman at Exos, and Benny at Canva—and they all point to the same few insights.

If you take away one thing, let it be this: start small and be strategic. Automate the repetitive, protect creative time, put your system where people work, and measure relentlessly. Do that and your design team stops being exhausted and becomes a growth engine.

If you want help mapping this into a plan for your organization, I’d start with that 90-day sprint I outlined above. Run the audit, get the templates live, measure the time saved, and iterate. The ROI often shows up faster than people expect.

Design wins don’t come from prettier pixels; they come from strategic systems that let visuals do the heavy lifting for your story, your sales motion, and your culture. Do the work at the system level and the creativity, scale, and business results will follow.

🔁 Quick reference checklist (copy & use)

Run a 20-minute audit of top creative requests
Create 5 high-impact editable templates this month
Block creative deep-work time weekly
Test one AI use case for 30 days (translation, resizing, summarizing)
Track three KPIs: one business, one output, one people metric
Launch internal training + office hours
Collect and fold field feedback into template updates

📣 Final note

I’m glad you’re thinking seriously about visual-first strategy—this is where brand meets business. If you want to put this into motion, pick one small experiment from the checklist and commit to tracking the results. The compounding effect of small improvements to process, systems, and training is what turns design from a cost center into a competitive advantage.

Resources & next steps

Thanks for reading — below are a few practical additions you can append to your rollout or share internally. Note: no external links were provided to insert into the article, so these are text-first resources you can paste into your brand portal or internal comms.

90-day checklist (copyable):
- Week 1–2: Audit top 100 assets, map owners, score priority
- Week 3–4: Deliver 5–7 editable templates and publish to portal
- Week 5–6: Run 2–3 trainings and a small field pilot
- Week 7–9: Test 1–2 AI automations and measure time saved
- Week 10–12: Collect KPIs and expand access based on feedback
Post-campaign 10-question review (one-paragraph form):
What worked? What didn’t? How many creative hours were used? Was the brief clear? Were templates sufficient? Was localization timely? Did the team feel supported? What single change would improve the next campaign? Score overall satisfaction 1–5.
Internal launch talking points:
Why we refreshed (business goals), what’s changing (templates, portal, processes), how this helps you (faster assets, fewer reviews), and where to go for help (office hours and templates).

If you want these as a downloadable one-pager or a ready-made brand portal page, copy the checklist above into your internal CMS or hand it to your operations lead to format. If you’d like help mapping these steps into a tailored plan for your organization, consider assigning an operations lead and running the initial 20-minute audit this week.