Hi, I'm Talia.

Senior brand designer who builds things. I design identity systems, campaign frameworks, and production pipelines — and increasingly, the tools I use to deliver them. Six years in-house at Uncommon Goods and Jonathan Adler. Now working at the intersection of brand craft and AI.

In-house experience

Senior Designer · 2025–Present

Uncommon Goods

Uncommon GoodsUncommon GoodsUncommon GoodsUncommon GoodsUncommon Goods
Senior Brand Designer · 2022–2025

Jonathan Adler

Jonathan AdlerJonathan AdlerJonathan Adler

Freelance

Brand Designer · 2025

Perebel

Perebel icon
Designer & Illustrator · 2025

Lalou

LalouLalouLalou
Brand Identity Designer · 2025

Wild Signal

Wild Signal

Lab

Self-initiated work at the edge of what brand designers are supposed to know how to build.

Interactive Toy

Orbs

A meditative widget collection — gestural, generative, and slightly hypnotic.

Brand Toolkit

Groundwork

An AI-powered operating system for brand engagements — custom intake, live brand mixer, auto-generated proposals, and smart asset delivery. Built because the standard process was broken.

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Uncommon Goods

Scalable creative systems and campaign execution for a design-driven e-commerce platform — 2M+ customers, one cohesive brand voice across every touchpoint.

Senior Designer
Paid social, product development, packaging, campaign creative
Story of YouStory of YouGift packagingStory of You

Overview

At Uncommon Goods — a Brooklyn-based e-commerce company serving 2M+ customers through a curated selection of unique, sustainable products — I work across the full spectrum of marketing and product needs. My role spans strategic direction and hands-on production: from defining campaign concepts and pitch frameworks to delivering final assets across email, social, web, and packaging. The volume and cadence of work requires systematized thinking, not bespoke solutions.

Campaign Design

I structure and produce marketing campaigns that balance performance goals against the playful, editorial voice that defines Uncommon Goods — working in close collaboration with design and creative directors.

My approach establishes a typography-first visual hierarchy optimized for product benefits, personalization, and gifting sentiment. Each campaign cycle informs the next—we test and refine creative iteratively with marketing, using performance data to sharpen decisions while preserving creative intuition.

Valentine's Day campaign creative

Story of You

Story of You is a customizable keepsake book that guides customers through creating a personal memoir. As lead designer, I partnered with merchandising, engineering, and product management to define the visual and editorial framework for a 100+ page book — navigating print production constraints, cross-team dependencies, and multiple proofing cycles. The product generated $117k in its first months post-launch, with a follow-up already in development.

Gift Packaging

I concepted, pitched, and designed a modular gift packaging system in collaboration with senior leadership — three sizes, a custom pocket for gift certificates, and sustainable materials aligned with brand commitments. The system prioritized scalability and material efficiency over bespoke production.

Gift packaging design
Gift packaging design
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Jonathan Adler

First creative hire for a new in-house department — I built design infrastructure, campaign systems, and brand standards from scratch for an iconic luxury home décor brand.

Senior Brand Designer
Brand systems, campaign production, catalog design, B2B program, retail signage
Jonathan Adler campaign 1Jonathan Adler catalog 1Jonathan Adler catalog 2

Overview

I was the first hire for the in-house Brand Creative team at Jonathan Adler — a new department charged with unifying and elevating brand visuals and voice across all customer touchpoints.

Jonathan Adler is a luxury home décor brand built on maximalist design, bold patterns, and irreverent humor — operating across e-commerce, retail, wholesale, and editorial channels, each with distinct production requirements. Joining as the senior designer of a department that didn't yet exist, I built systems and processes from the ground up while maintaining the high bar of craft the brand demands.

Alongside a weekly marketing production schedule, I worked with the department director to establish repeatable design workflows, documentation, and quality standards. Over three years, each seasonal cycle refined the system — what started as ad-hoc production evolved into a scalable framework that grew the team from one designer to several.

As the team grew, I moved from individual contributor to design lead — mentoring junior designers while continuing to own the highest-visibility projects and the systems beneath them.

Seasonal Promotional Design

I established a repeatable campaign framework for promotional marketing — one of the highest-volume, highest-visibility parts of my role. Each campaign's creative ships across email, SMS, web, social media, and retail print for all JA stores—requiring a system flexible enough to adapt across channels without losing cohesion.

My approach defined mini brand identities for each campaign—drawing from product catalog imagery to build cohesive visual systems. Typographic consistency became the structural anchor, creating space for bold color, movement, and decorative flourishes within the brand's maximalist language.

Promotional campaign 1
Promotional campaign 2

Selection of seasonal promotional campaigns spanning 2022–2025

Retail Signage

I designed in-store signage and retail graphics for all Jonathan Adler locations — standardizing a system from window displays to interior wayfinding across multiple store formats.

Retail signage 1
Retail signage 2

Catalog Design

Each season, I collaborated with Jonathan himself, leadership, and the Brand Creative Director to produce a fully custom product catalog. These 70+ page books reach 500,000+ customers quarterly — plus a holiday drop — with each edition building on the editorial structure and production learnings of the last.

Catalog spread 1
Catalog spread 2

B2B Program

I collaborated with senior leadership to consolidate and clarify the B2B program into a cohesive print catalog and dedicated landing page. The challenge was translating a consumer-facing luxury brand into B2B-appropriate messaging without diluting the visual identity — resulting in increased partnerships and new client acquisition.

B2B catalog 1
B2B catalog 2
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Wild Signal

End-to-end brand identity and application system for an AI-native communications agency — from logo and visual language through collateral and usage guidelines built to scale from launch.

Brand Designer (Freelance)
Full identity system, brand guidelines, marketing collateral

Overview

Wild Signal is an AI-native communications agency founded by experienced industry leaders, operating at the intersection of data-driven insight and creative execution. The company needed a complete visual identity that could establish credibility with enterprise clients from day one.

I developed the full identity system: logo, iconography, typography, color palette, and comprehensive brand guidelines. Working directly with both founders, I structured the visual language to be flexible enough for pitch decks today and scalable enough for a growing team and client roster over time.

Beyond the core identity, I produced launch-ready marketing assets—LinkedIn presence, pitch materials, and client-facing collateral for early engagements already on their roster.

Wild Signal Website

Logo Exploration

The constraint was clear: the mark needed to reference the initials WS without feeling literal or stiff. The brief called for trust and innovation with a subtle sense of playfulness—a visual shorthand for the agency's ability to simplify complex data and bring clarity to chaos.

These first-round concepts explore different structural interpretations of that idea, testing shape, personality, and flexibility to arrive at a mark that could function as a compact icon, an extended pattern, or a standalone symbol.

Logo Exploration 1

Pulse/radio wave, Scribble, direct messages, both S and W present in mark

Logo Exploration 2

Pulse/radio wave, Scribble, direct messages, both S and W present in mark

Logo Exploration 3

"W" and "S" present in mark, pen-like strokes, can be used as an abstract font / extended background pattern

Logo Exploration 4

Arrow directing to specific point, abstract "W," snowflake imagery represents uniqueness of insights

Logo Exploration 5

Growing radio/signal wave, paint marks, scribbled "W" and "S," can be made into hand-drawn pattern

Logo Exploration 6

Growing radio/signal wave, paint marks, abstract "W"

Logo Exploration 7

Organic shape, growth, abstract "w"

Logo Exploration 8

Arch signal element, connecting journeys, "S", puzzle pieces coming together to make a clear image

Final Logos

Wild Signal Logo Light
Wild Signal Secondary Logo
Wild Signal Logo Midnight
Wild Signal Logo Fire
Wild Signal Logo Sea
Wild Signal Logo Sand

Wayfinder Mark

The Wayfinder is a secondary brand element that distills the Wild Signal identity into a compact, versatile mark. Designed to adapt over time, it serves as a navigational icon, badge, and standalone symbol across brand touchpoints—giving the system a flexible secondary element independent of the primary logo.

Wild Signal Wayfinder Mark

Brand Guide

The completed brand kit includes comprehensive guidelines for logo usage, typography hierarchy, color applications, and iconography. The system was structured so that non-designers on the team could apply it correctly without art direction—prioritizing consistency and self-service over bespoke production.

Visit wildsignal.agency →

Primary Palette

Sea #00B5BF
Fire #FA5F22
Sand #F3DB99
Light #F2FDFD
Dark #191A1B

Secondary Palette

Sea Dark #005C5F
Sea Light #B4E5E3
Fire Dark #C74A15
Fire Light #FFE4DE
Sand Dark #C9A86C
Sand Light #FFF1CD

Gradients

Website

The landing page translates the brand system into a marketing environment — establishing credibility with enterprise prospects while preserving the visual identity's distinctiveness. Typography, color, and layout reinforce the same principles defined in the guidelines.

Wild Signal Landing Page
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Lalou

Visual language design for an AI-driven children's storytelling platform — building an illustration system that became the generative foundation for the entire product experience.

Designer / Illustrator (Freelance)
Visual language definition, illustration system, AI style parameters, product UI
Lalou hero

Overview

Lalou is an early-stage storytelling platform that lets families create personalized bedtime stories for their children. The product sits at the intersection of handcrafted illustration and AI-generated content — each story produces custom illustrated scenes and personalized voiceovers through ElevenLabs.

My role was to define the visual language that would underpin every surface of the product. Working from an initial palette and typography direction, I developed a complete illustration system — character proportions, line weight rules, color application logic, and compositional patterns — that gave the brand its recognizable visual identity.

A critical design constraint: the app generates custom illustrated scenes per story using AI. I authored the style parameters and visual rules so that AI-generated output would feel like a natural extension of the handcrafted originals — not a departure from them. This meant designing not just illustrations, but a reproducible visual system.

Illustration Exploration

I explored a wide range of illustration directions to find a balance between expressive, childlike spontaneity and the clean, modular sensibility a digital product requires. Early sketches tested variations in line weight, proportions, and styling to define a repeatable structure flexible enough for story prompts, character moments, and UI surfaces.

Illustration exploration sketches
Illustration exploration
Illustration exploration
Illustration exploration

Final Illustrations

With the visual direction approved, I translated the chosen style into a complete illustration set — each asset refined for consistency, clarity, and usability across the product ecosystem. The final suite balances personality with functional simplicity, supporting both in-app moments and broader brand storytelling.

Illustration System Parameters

  • Consistent line weight with rounded endcaps for warmth and approachability
  • Oversized character proportions for expressiveness across small screen sizes
  • Flat color fills with limited shading — optimized for AI reproduction fidelity
  • Botanical and nature motifs as connective tissue across story scenes
  • Modular compositional rules allowing AI to generate on-brand scenes from narrative prompts
Final illustration 1
Final illustration 2
Final illustration - Hug
Final illustration - Kid Hero
Final illustration - Plants

In-App Mockups

Once the illustration language was established, I brought it into early product mockups to test how the system would operate within the app. The screens pair simple, intuitive UI with playful visual moments—optimizing for clarity for parents and engagement for children.

The AI voice generation layer adds personalization without interface complexity. The design decision was to keep the technology invisible—users experience the result, not the mechanism.

App screen - Welcome
App screen - Single story
App screen - Finish Onboarding
App screen - Success

Landing Page

The landing page extends the brand identity into a marketing environment structured around conversion and trust. It introduces the platform's purpose, surfaces the AI-driven storytelling approach, and guides users through core features. Layout, typography, and illustration work together to make a product that involves AI feel approachable rather than technical.

Lalou Landing Page
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Perebel

Brand identity and a custom-built live mixer for an AI-native immigration platform — so the client could explore directions in real time instead of waiting on a PDF.

2026
Brand Designer (Freelance)
Perebel marketing site hero — Your firm's entire operating layer, from intake to outcome

Overview

Perebel is an immigration case management platform built by MM Labs. The software runs the operating layer of a small immigration firm, from intake and onboarding through document processing, billing, and case outcome. Two audiences live inside the same product: lawyers managing a caseload, and immigrants going through one of the highest-stakes moments of their lives.

The brief asked for a mark that could hold both registers at once: trustworthy enough for an attorney reviewing a case file, and warm enough for a client reading a status update. I worked through the metaphor outward from a single question: what does this product do for the person using it?

Brand Mixer

The turnaround was tight (four weeks from kickoff to incubator deadline), so I built a live mixer to speed up the conversation. Instead of exporting eight palette and type combinations into a PDF, the client could open a URL and swap directions in real time: cycle through palettes, pair them with different logo marks, try the full system in light and dark modes, and see it all applied to a marketing hero and a product card.

It replaced the usual deck review with something closer to design-in-public. The embed below is a preserved early version showing the full range of directions we tested before locking the system.

Logo Exploration

Sketches filled a few pages before anything digital happened. From there, I grouped the strongest directions into four conceptual families, each testing a different metaphor for the work Perebel supports. The final mark came out of Group A: the arched passage, a threshold between one life and the next.

Early Sketches

Perebel logo sketches on graph paper

Initial Directions

Logo Group A — Passage / Threshold

Group A · Passage / Threshold. Arched doorways and gates, the movement from one status to another. The direction that became the final mark.

Logo Group C — Document / Analog

Group C · Document / Analog. Folded paper, dog-eared pages, the physical weight of a file. A nod to the paperwork that runs through every case.

Logo Group D — Annotation / Signature

Group D · Annotation / Signature. Handwritten P forms, reading as a margin note or a signed endorsement. Personal, but harder to scale.

Logo Group E — Destination / Pin

Group E · Destination / Pin. Map pins and clover-leaf arrivals, framing the outcome instead of the journey. Read too literally, cut early.

Logo Suite

The wordmark is set in EB Garamond, a serif with enough formality for a legal workspace and enough warmth for a client portal. The same letterforms translate into a lockup and a standalone icon, giving the team three marks they can deploy without making design decisions: wordmark for headers and primary surfaces, lockup for signatures and co-branding, icon for favicons, app tiles, and tight layouts.

Icon

Perebel icon, cream on cordovan
Perebel icon, cordovan on sky
Perebel icon, cordovan on cream

Wordmark

Perebel wordmark, cream on cordovan
Perebel wordmark, cordovan on sky
Perebel wordmark, cordovan on cream

Lockup

Perebel lockup, cream on cordovan
Perebel lockup, cordovan on sky
Perebel lockup, cordovan on cream

Color Palette

Warm, paint-and-ink, built to signal someone understands the weight of the work. Three neutrals anchor the system (cordovan, cream, sand) with six chromatic supporting tones that carry emotion through client-facing surfaces. Every usable pairing was checked for WCAG AA contrast so the same palette can drive both the lawyer register and the client register without additional decisions.

Primary Palette

Cordovan #2B0000
Cream #f4f0e2
Sand #dccba9

Supporting Palette

Auburn #631300
Poppy #e8843a
Sunlight #edb750
Grass #4B700E
Ocean #3a7a96
Sky #95c2d4

Typography

Display / Heading
EB Garamond
Body / UI
General Sans
Role
Spec
Display
EB Garamond · Regular · 48px / 52px
Heading
EB Garamond · Regular · 28px / 34px
Body
General Sans · Regular · 15px / 22px
Label / UI
General Sans · Medium · 11px / 16px · 0.08em tracking · uppercase
EB Garamond does the trust-building.

General Sans is the working surface — UI labels, dashboard fields, body copy in the product. It leans a touch more modern than the serif lets on, which is what holds the client-facing register without breaking the system.

EB Garamond reads as legal, sober, unmistakably professional. The kind of serif a traditional attorney audience expects to see on a document they're about to sign.

Both faces had to clear two practical hurdles: open-source for a pre-seed budget, and multilingual coverage for clients reading in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Vietnamese. The chosen pair handles the Latin-extended range without falling back mid-paragraph.

Final System

The locked direction (P3), shown across every mockup at once.

PreviousJonathan AdlerNextLalou
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Quip × Wix Playground

End-to-end product campaign — photography, web design, and animation from a formal client brief at the Wix Playground Academy.

Web Designer / Photographer
Photography direction, web design, animation
Quip hero — styled product shot with clean background

Overview

The Wix Playground Academy is a selective program covering studio photography, coding, animation, UX, art direction, and marketing. The program operates on real client briefs with professional production standards.

This project responded to a formal brief from Quip, a DTC dental company. The challenge was repositioning an everyday product as a desirable gift—shifting the framing from utility to experience. All photography, animation, and web design is original work.

Product Photography

I styled and photographed the Quip product line with a focus on clean, elevated compositions that reinforce the gifting narrative. The approach established a repeatable structure across shot types—detailed close-ups, full-set arrangements, and lifestyle contexts—to support different marketing surfaces.

Product shot — toothbrush on solid background
Product shot — full set with styling propsFeatured on quip's official instagram page
Lifestyle shot — product in bathroom setting
Detail shot — close-up of brush head

Sample Landing Page

The landing page concept positions Quip as an ideal gift, structuring the narrative around packaging elegance and subscription value. Clean typography and generous whitespace let the photography carry the persuasion—a deliberate choice to prioritize image quality over layout complexity.

PreviousPerebelNextChea Seed
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Chea Seed

Website design and information architecture for a digital-first career coaching platform — translating app product into a marketing-ready web presence.

Web Designer (Freelance)
Site architecture, wireframes, visual design, page structure

Overview

Chea Seed is a digital-first career coaching platform—a career fitness tracker that helps users navigate raises, reviews, job transitions, and professional confidence. The product existed as an app; the website needed to translate that experience into a compelling marketing surface.

Working directly with the CEO and lead developer, I mapped the app's structure, brand personality, and user value into a scalable framework for the site—product information, company backstory, blog, and career resources. The challenge was structuring content for two distinct audiences: new visitors discovering the product and returning users seeking resources.

Visit cheaseed.com →

Wireframes

The wireframing process established information hierarchy and user flow before committing to visual design. Each page structure was defined around a clear decision: what does this audience need first, and what can wait? This prioritized scannability and conversion paths over visual density.

Chea Seed Wireframe 1
Chea Seed Wireframe 2
Chea Seed Wireframe 3
Chea Seed Wireframe Overview
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Orbs

A browser tab that looks like a mirror until you rub your hands together and summon a plasma orb. The physics aren't real, but the feeling of holding one is.

Single-page web experience
Vanilla JS · Three.js · MediaPipe · Web Audio
Concept, design, build, deploy
Launch Orbs

The idea

It started as a question about hand tracking. Could a browser do something genuinely physical-feeling without any hardware beyond a laptop camera? I'd been reading about MediaPipe, a machine learning library that maps 21 landmarks across each hand in real time, and I wanted to know what you could do with it if the goal wasn't utility.

The reference point was Dragon Ball Z. That childhood feeling of watching someone cup their hands and gather energy between them, something invisible made tangible through concentration and gesture. Not the show's aesthetic literally, just the sensation of it. Could a browser window make someone feel like they were holding something that wasn't there?

Turns out you can, as long as every design decision protects the illusion.

Dragon Ball Z energy gathering reference
Ki-blast inspiration
Energy ball reference
Comic-book energy reference

The concept

The whole thing runs in the browser. No app, no install, just a URL and camera access. MediaPipe tracks both hands at the same time, mapping 21 landmark points per hand at roughly 30 frames per second, and the orb's position, size, and energy state are derived entirely from those landmarks: where your palms are, how far apart your hands are, the pinch distance between your fingers, how fast your hands are moving.

The visual system is built in layers on an HTML canvas (outer haze, plasma surface deformed by simplex noise, inner core, corona tendrils, spark particles), each layer responding to the orb's energy state. At rest it breathes slowly. Charged, it pulses and throws sparks. At maximum energy the color ramps from purple through orange to white-hot and the containment warning trips.

The aesthetic direction was "scientific instrument meets occult artifact": clinical telemetry presentation of something obviously magical. The humor is entirely in the contrast, with deadpan readouts like PLASMA TEMP: 4,200K and CONTAINMENT STATUS: NOMINAL for what is clearly a glowing fantasy fireball. The widgets take themselves completely seriously, which is the whole joke.

The decisions

No hand skeleton. My first instinct was to render MediaPipe's landmark points as a visible overlay, dots and lines showing the tracking in real time. I cut it immediately because the moment you can see the mechanism, the illusion collapses. The orb and particles are the only evidence anything is happening, and the technology has to disappear.

Thermal color, not rainbow. A rainbow ramp reads as tech demo, since it signals "look what this can do" rather than "feel what this is." A thermal ramp from deep purple at rest through red-orange and gold up to white-hot reads as energy, and purple as the cool state felt magical where blue would have felt clinical. Color is doing the emotional work.

Full-screen camera, not a widget. A small mirror in the corner makes the effect feel like a feature. Full-screen puts you inside the experience, so you're not looking at a tool, you're in a room with an orb. That shift in scale is what makes the whole thing feel architectural instead of gimmicky.

Discovery over instruction. There's no tutorial anywhere on the page. You show your hands and something sparks. You bring them together and it charges. You figure out you can throw it. The experience tracks which gestures you've found in-session and only surfaces hints for the ones you haven't, so the interface feels like it's paying attention to you specifically. Finding each mechanic on your own is the experience.

Fiction as design language. The telemetry numbers (energy percentage, plasma temperature, containment status, throw velocity) are completely made up. There's no real frequency, no actual temperature threshold. But I made them up carefully, because the metrics were the language I used to think through how the orb should look and feel at each charge state. Energy maps to color, frequency maps to how the surface pulses, and temperature is why it shifts from purple to white-hot. The values are invented but they correlate exactly with what's on screen, which is what makes the readouts feel credible.

Japanese as authorship, not decoration. Widget headers run in Japanese with monospaced English subtitles beneath: 気力測定 / ORB TELEMETRY, 手の動き / HAND METRICS. The page title is a single kanji. A small watermark credits 気力研究所, a completely fictional Ki Energy Research Institute. These aren't translation choices, they set a register: terse, slightly ceremonial, like the object has its own institutional backstory. People who read Japanese catch a different layer of the joke. People who don't just think it's a design choice.

Monospaced throughout, no display type. The original build spec included Bangers, the chunky comic font, as a nod to the source material. I replaced it with Space Mono across everything because Bangers reads as costume; mono type reads as instrument. The gap between "I know what this is referencing" and "this looks like a fan site" is entirely typographic.

オーブの計測値
Orb Telemetry
Energy23%
TempWARM
Size0.84
Freq3.3HZ
手引き
Guide
HANDS TOGETHER →
PULL APART TO RELEASE
手の計測値
Hand Metrics
Hands2
Distance0.31
Pinch L0.66
Pinch R0.54
Velocity0.02
注意!熱い — CAREFUL! HOT
エネルギー
CHARGE

The series

Orbs is the first in an ongoing series of hand-tracking experiences built on the same interaction engine. Each release swaps the orb material, widget aesthetic, and corner graphic treatment, while the gestures and physics stay consistent. The first skin is this one: comic book source material, Japanese branding, thermal color. Future skins will run on the same engine with completely different visual registers.

The format is a numbered drop series, and this is Issue 01.

What this project is really about

Orbs isn't solving a problem. It was a question I had: could I make someone feel something through a screen they'd never felt before? Answering it meant learning a graphics pipeline, a machine learning library, a noise algorithm, and a Web Audio API I'd never touched, mostly to protect an illusion most people will experience for about ninety seconds and immediately want to show someone else.

That loop (the thing you stumble into, want to understand, and immediately hand to another person) is what I was designing toward, and getting there meant learning how to build it.

Launch the live experience

Allow camera access. Best in Chrome or Safari on a laptop.

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Groundwork

An operating system for my freelance brand work. Four tools that share state and feed each other (intake, mixer, proposal, asset hub), built so I can deliver an engagement end-to-end without stitching together a stack of third-party apps.

Operating system for brand engagements
Next.js · TypeScript · Tailwind · AI brief generation
Concept, design, build, deploy, in-use

Why I built it

I built Groundwork because the standard brand engagement process is broken. You spend weeks on a system, then put it in a PDF and ask a client to imagine how it all fits together. It never works.

Groundwork is four tools that share state and feed each other — and the AI intelligence running underneath is what makes it work.

After a client call, I dump my meeting notes in. The intake generates custom questions on top of my default set — adding things specific to the project I might not have thought to ask, flagging compliance considerations, surfacing contradictions in what the client said they wanted. When they submit, I get an email synthesizing their answers into prioritized next steps and callouts.

Those same answers drive everything downstream. The proposal auto-generates from intake responses — no rewriting scope language for every client. The asset checklist builds itself from their specific needs, dimensions, and delivery contexts. And the brand mixer gives clients a live environment to explore directions in real time, within combinations I've already vetted as design-coherent. They feel like they're driving. The rails are mine.

First engagement I used it on: sign-off that usually takes a week happened in one afternoon.

Intake Questionnaire

The intake generates itself from my notes. After the first call or two with a client, I dump my meeting notes in, and it builds a custom questionnaire on top of my default question set, adding things specific to the project that I might not have thought to ask. Compliance constraints I should be flagging, execution styles that fit their timeline, platform-specific things. I can edit anything before it goes out.

What makes it work for the client is that it's not a generic form. The questions help them figure out what they actually want and need to prioritize, not just collect their answers. When they submit, I get an email with a synthesis and a prioritized list of next steps I can take or leave.

That same submission also drives the proposal and the asset checklist downstream, which is why it sits at the front of the workflow.

Try the live demo →

Brand Mixer

The mixer is the visualization layer, and I use it as a follow-up to a normal presentation. I'll walk a client through each brand element on its own first (typography, color palette, logo marks) and then send them the mixer link so they can live with it and play with combinations themselves.

The thing that makes it useful and not chaotic is that I curate the combinations they can actually try. I've constrained the pairings to ones I've already vetted as design-coherent, so they're not freely combining a serif with a clashing palette. They feel like they're driving, but the rails are mine.

On a recent engagement this saved a few days of back-and-forth. The client landed on a combination they loved, and I could tell from their reactions that things finally clicked once they saw the brand in context instead of in the abstract.

Try the live demo →

Proposal

The proposal is an e-signable scope agreement that auto-generates from the intake answers and any notes I've added since. It's a template that gets customized to the engagement automatically, then locked once both parties sign. The same answers that drive my internal priority list also drive the proposal, so I'm not rewriting scope language for every client.

Try the live demo →

Asset Upload

The asset hub is the tool that surprised me by being more useful internally than externally.

The checklist is AI-generated from the intake answers, my meeting notes, and any exceptions I've added. It's pre-loaded with standard brand asset package requirements, so it knows what a typical handoff needs (logo variations, color tokens, type license, favicon kit) and tailors the list to whatever the engagement specifically calls for.

What's actually been most useful is that I use it before I hand anything off. As I build assets, I check them in against the list, and it surfaces what's still missing, flags inconsistent file naming, and keeps the folder structure clean. By the time I'm ready to share with the client, the work has already been quality-controlled against the original requirements. When I do share, the client can preview every asset, download the full package as a zip or grab individual files, and forward the link to anyone who needs it.

Try the live demo →

What this project is really about

Groundwork started as a way to deliver one engagement end-to-end and turned into how I deliver every brand engagement. The unexpected piece was how much of its value flows toward me, not the client. The client gets a faster, clearer workflow, and I get a memory system that compounds across projects.

The shape of the next iteration is already visible from where this one leaves off: a presentation layer that replaces the static slides I still walk clients through live, and a revision portal for the back-and-forth that happens after the mixer phase. Both are versions of the same idea, which is moving more of the workflow inside the tool, where it can compound.

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Currently living in Brooklyn, NY
Born & raised in the Bay Area, California
I have three brothers (and a nephew I'm obsessed with)
Got my BFA in Design from University of Southern California
Serial museum goer and home goods window shopper
I love anything to do with arts & crafts (drawing especially)
Currently living in Brooklyn, NY
Born & raised in the Bay Area, California
I have three brothers (and a nephew I'm obsessed with)
Got my BFA in Design from University of Southern California
Serial museum goer and home goods window shopper
I love anything to do with arts & crafts (drawing especially)

I'm Talia, a brand and visual designer based in Brooklyn. I build design systems, campaign frameworks, and visual identities that hold up at scale — shaped by six years in-house at Uncommon Goods and Jonathan Adler, plus 25+ freelance brand builds for startups and small businesses since my time at USC.

My work sits at the intersection of brand craft and operational thinking — translating strategy into production-ready systems across digital, print, and retail, and collaborating cross-functionally with engineering, marketing, and product teams. I'm increasingly drawn to how AI tools reshape creative workflows, and I use them daily in my own practice.

View resume
Talia Malchin
Figma
Ps
Photoshop
Ai
Illustrator
Id
InDesign
Ae
After Effects
Framer
HTML/CSS
Claude Code
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Midjourney
Figma
Ps
Photoshop
Ai
Illustrator
Id
InDesign
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After Effects
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HTML/CSS
Claude Code
Webflow
Midjourney

Things I love

Jaymin's Food Blog

Jaymin's food and tea blog exhibits a truly mindful, ritualistic and loving approach to meal-making. And his serving trays collection is the cutest thing I've ever seen.

Quilt

Masterful baby quilts handmade by @into.the.fold

Sheila Hicks

Sheila Hicks' meditative textile work; "Some people think I'm working, but they don't realize I'm thinking."

Eames Miniatures

Miniature versions of my favorite iconic Herman Miller chairs.

Peter Funch

Peter Funch's photography project capturing the same NYC commuters, on the same corner, at the same hour, over a nine year period.

Shelton Art Co

One of my favorite current painters whose pieces just hit every time. In awe of his technique.

Shishi San

Tufted vases. INSANE work by Shishi San.

Female Alchemy

@female.alchemy's ceramic pieces are judging you.

Craighill

Craighill is an excellent design agency with even more excellent design process videos.

Sam Evans Art

Painter Sam Evans who captures some of my favorite TV moments in romantic acrylic scenes.

Silver Springs

Stevie Nicks belting Silver Springs directly at Lindsey Buckingham in their debut post-breakup performance.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Philosophical, semi-fictional novel based on author Robert Pirsig's real life and search for the meaning, and definition, of life.

Fhirst Branding

True, unadulterated, no BS 2000's core actually well-captured by modern day branding. You had to be there.

Suzuki Jimny

Something about how boxy, compact, macho and cute this thing looks...

Jonathan Hoefler

Type design master and subject of one of my favorite Abstract documentary episodes on Netflix.

The Creative Independent

Some high quality, digestible, design-centered blog posts and think pieces.

Teenage Engineering EP-1320

Already iconic Teenage Engineering's limited edition medieval themed sampler.

Esperanza

Maria Medem's illustration style matches perfectly with this Hermano's Gutierrez's song. Sometimes things *are* perfect.

Let's connect

Vintage rotary phone