Building a scalable brand system for OTPP’s global organization
Led OTPP’s enterprise rebrand by building a scalable, accessible design system that improved speed, strengthened consistency, and supported rollout across teams, channels, and regions.
2021-2022
Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan
OTPP is one of Canada’s largest pension funds, managing over $247B in assets with a global investment footprint.
Scalable Design Systems
Accessibility
Brand Strategy
Leadership
Outcome
Built a scalable brand system that made OTPP easier to communicate, easier to manage internally, and more consistent across digital, print, and environmental applications.
Why It Mattered
As OTPP’s global footprint grew, the brand needed to work harder across teams, regions, and channels. The challenge was not only visual consistency. It was building a system people could use confidently and efficiently at scale.
Results
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30% faster content creation and delivery
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Global rollout across digital, print, and environmental touchpoints
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WCAG 2.0 AA compliance across brand assets
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Stronger internal trust and consistency
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Improved brand perception for a global audience
Overview
Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan is one of Canada’s largest institutional investors, with a growing global presence and an expanding set of brand needs. As the organization evolved, its brand system needed to do more than look polished. It needed to work across teams, channels, and regions with greater clarity and consistency.
I led the rebrand with a focus on building a scalable design system, not just refreshing the visual identity. The goal was to create a brand foundation that was easier to use, easier to govern, and better aligned with OTPP’s global reputation and ambitions.
The challenge
The existing brand had to support a large and growing organization with increasingly varied use cases. Teams needed to create work across digital, print, and environmental applications, but doing that consistently and efficiently was becoming harder than it should have been.
The challenge was not simply to create a more modern expression. It was to build a system that could support:
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consistency across channels and regions
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faster content creation and delivery
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accessible brand standards
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practical adoption by teams across the organization
This was as much an operational design challenge as it was a creative one.
My role
As Manager, UX and Creative, I led the rebrand from both a strategic and systems perspective. I partnered with internal stakeholders and external collaborators to define the direction, align decision-makers, and translate the brand into a practical system teams could actually use.
My role included shaping the creative direction, guiding the design system, and making sure the work supported accessibility, usability, and rollout across multiple touchpoints. A key part of the job was helping the organization move from isolated brand execution toward a more coherent operating system for how OTPP communicates.
Strategic insight
The most important insight was that OTPP did not need more brand assets. It needed a stronger brand system.
In large organizations, inconsistency often comes less from a lack of taste and more from a lack of usable structure. If the standards are too abstract, teams improvise. If the system is too rigid, adoption suffers. The right answer was to build a framework that made strong brand decisions easier, faster, and more repeatable.
That insight shaped the whole approach: create a flexible but disciplined design system that could support both consistency and real-world use.
What I changed
1. Built a scalable design system
I helped create a system that could extend across digital, print, and environmental touchpoints without losing cohesion. That mattered because OTPP needed a brand that could show up consistently across a global organization.
2. Improved accessibility across brand assets
Accessibility was treated as part of the brand standard, not a later layer of compliance. The resulting assets achieved WCAG 2.0 AA compliance, which improved quality and inclusiveness across applications.
3. Made the system easier for teams to use
A major focus was creating a structure that internal teams could apply confidently in day-to-day work. Clearer standards, documentation, and asset design reduced ambiguity and improved speed to market.
4. Strengthened consistency across channels and regions
The rebrand was designed to work across different formats, teams, and use cases. That mattered because OTPP’s brand had to feel coherent not only centrally, but anywhere it appeared.
5. Turned the rebrand into an operational tool
Rather than treating the project as a one-time visual refresh, I helped shape it as a long-term system. The value came not only from the new expression, but from the way it improved repeatability, trust, and organizational efficiency.
A concrete example
One of the clearest signs the system was working was how well it translated into everyday use. The updated brand supported everything from corporate presentations and publications to digital applications and internal communications, helping teams produce work that felt consistently OTPP without reinventing the brand each time.
That mattered because a design system only becomes valuable when it works under real constraints, across real teams, and in everyday execution.
Results and Impact
The rebrand produced measurable gains across efficiency, consistency, and perception:
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30% faster content creation and delivery. This mattered because teams could move faster without sacrificing quality or consistency.
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Global rollout across digital, print, and environmental applications. This mattered because it showed the system was practical enough to scale across real organizational complexity.
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WCAG 2.0 AA compliance across brand assets. This mattered because accessibility became part of the standard, not a separate requirement.
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Stronger internal trust and consistency. This mattered because the brand became easier to use and easier to align around.
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Improved brand perception for a global audience. This mattered because OTPP could present itself with greater clarity and confidence across the markets and communities it serves.
The larger outcome was a stronger foundation for future brand and digital work, not just a successful launch.
Leadership and influence
My leadership approach centered on translation and alignment. I brought together business goals, brand ambition, accessibility requirements, and practical team needs into a system people could understand and adopt.
That meant helping stakeholders make decisions with confidence, creating shared standards across functions, and ensuring the work was strong not just creatively, but operationally. I also helped increase internal design maturity by showing how brand systems can support both creativity and consistency at scale.
Tony brought a strong mix of strategic clarity and design systems thinking to this work. He helped turn brand ambition into something practical, scalable, and easier for teams to use consistently across the organization.
Joe Smith, Manager, OTPP
Learnings
This project reinforced that brand systems are most valuable when they reduce friction, not just when they look refined.
In large organizations, good branding is not only about expression. It is about making clarity easier to sustain across people, channels, and time. The strongest design systems do not constrain good work. They make it easier to produce.
"This wasn’t just a rebrand. It was an enterprise transformation through design."