Creative Leadership | Brand Strategy | Creative Direction
A new company needed a creative function — not just a designer.
When Candescent spun out of NCR, it inherited products and clients but had to build its brand and creative operation almost from the ground up. My role was creative leadership at the company level — brand systems, flagship event brands, cross-functional strategy, and the global teams to deliver it all.
The Company
Candescent
The Role
Creative leadership — brand & design
Reported to
CMO & VP of Marketing
The Scope
Brand systems, event brands, creative strategy, global teams
Teams Lead
Offshore creative — Philippines & Malaysia, UK Vendors
The Situation
A spin-off starts with almost everything to build.
When a company separates from a parent as established as NCR, it keeps the products and the clients — but much of the brand infrastructure, the creative operation, and the institutional design knowledge stays behind or has to be rebuilt for a new identity.
Candescent needed more than someone to make things look good. It needed creative leadership — someone who could operate across brand strategy, design systems, flagship events, and executive communication, while building and directing the teams to execute it all consistently.
That's the role I stepped into: creative leadership at the company level, reporting to the CMO, working across the organization to give a newly independent fintech company a creative function it could actually run on.
Creative leadership across the whole organization.
The Role
Brand design
& Systems
Led brand design for Candescent — building and maintaining the visual systems, standards, and assets that a newly independent company needed to present itself consistently across every channel and touchpoint.
Flagship Event
Brands Development
Directed the creative for Candescent's conference brands — including AXIS, the company's new flagship event, and other industry conferences — from strategy and identity through experiential execution.
Cross-functional
Creative Strategy
Partnered across marketing, sales, product, and executive leadership to align creative work with business goals — translating strategy into brand and design that served the whole organization, not just one department.
Global Team
Leadership
Built and directed offshore creative teams across the Philippines and Malaysia — coordinating output, maintaining quality, and holding a consistent creative standard across time zones and continents.
Executive &
C-suite Support
Worked directly with C-suite leadership on high-visibility creative — presentations, brand moments, and materials where the stakes were the company's reputation and the audience was its most senior stakeholders.
"A company this new needed creative that could keep up with how fast it was defining itself — and hold together while it did."
The Approach
The challenge of company-level creative leadership at a spin-off isn't any single deliverable — it's consistency at scale, while everything is still in motion. The brand was evolving, the company was defining itself, and the work had to keep pace without fragmenting.
That meant building repeatable systems rather than one-off solutions, directing distributed teams toward a single vision, and being the through-line that kept the creative coherent across events, departments, and executive needs.
Build the system. Lead the teams. Hold the standard.
Creative leadership at this level is as much organizational as it is visual. It means managing stakeholders, aligning competing priorities, and reading the politics of a young company finding its footing — all while protecting the quality and consistency of the work.
That instinct for organizational navigation — knowing when to push, when to align, and how to keep creative moving inside a complex company — became one of the most valuable parts of the role.
Navigate the organization, not just the design.
The Outcome
A creative function a new company could run on.
Candescent came out of the transition with brand systems, flagship event brands, and a creative operation capable of supporting a company still defining who it was — delivered consistently across departments, events, and continents.
The through-line across all of it was leadership: not just producing the work, but building the systems, directing the teams, and holding the standard that let a young company present itself with confidence.
Multiple Brands
Flagship and conference event brands including AXIS, directed end to end
3 Continents
Global creative teams directed across the North America, APAC and Europe
C-Suite
Direct creative partnership with executive leadership on high-visibility work
The Takeaway
This is the fractional model — before it was fractional.
Company-level creative leadership at Candescent is exactly the work I now bring to brands as a Fractional Creative Director: building the systems, directing the execution, aligning creative to business, and navigating the organization to get there.
The difference now is the model. The same senior creative leadership that a spin-off fintech needed full-time is available to hospitality, events, and lifestyle brands on the terms that fit them — the thinking and the direction, without the overhead.
Need creative leadership without the full-time hire?
That's exactly what a Fractional Creative Director is for. Let's talk.