Vouch
Vouch is an early-stage tech startup dounded in Sydney in 2021. It's the leading video-first AI content platform for talent teams, working with global brands like Warner Bros Discovery, Stryker, GoDaddy, MongoDB and many more.
I joined in 2022 and found the brand in an interesting place. There were brand elements and guidelines but it's quite clear to me that a number of them had been quietly retired. Some small mascots called lovekins had been banished and the photography style was no longer the right fit. What remained was a typeface, a palette (used with extreme caution), and a lot of product imagery. My job was to see what moves I could come up with with those remaining elements.
The first real test was producing around 75 images for a new product section on the website. For a video product, the challenge is not repeating the same thing over and over. One of the things I'm most pleased with from that period is video I created which is a full-screen masonry of videos, all playing simultaneously, cascading in. A simple idea, but it showed immediately what Vouch could capture, and put people first. It came about as an experiment when updating our LinkedIn header and quickly became a key hero visual for Vouch, which is still used today.
Animations became one of our most reliable tools — combining video and motion graphics to show the product in action. For any major feature release we launched with a high quality animation loop which I would plan and produce, and sometimes create music for.
The first rebrand
Late 2023, the brand needed to evolve. We spoke with a few agencies but decided we could do it in-house (this became something of a recurring theme).
The palette — pinks, reds, and crimsons — had to go. It felt heavy, cloying almost and didn't feel like Vouch. We had some underused secondary teals, and we started exploring those. Then our CEO walked in with a picture of three Uniqlo baseball caps: one off-white, one light teal, and one a slightly darker teal. The rest is history.
I extrapolated a system from those three colours and transposed it to the website via Figma. The website is always the litmus test. The new palette gave me considerably more room to move — we introduced an expanding circular motif, updated the animation style and things started to feel like us.
That identity served us well for eighteen months.
The 2025 rebrand
The product grea at pace and we found a new market. When the time came to launch a major product extension, we knew it was time to take another look at the brand.
The brief I set myself was to create something more defensible. A lot of companies in this space had converged on similar visual identities — I hfound examples where some had borrowed whole layouts from our website. We shared a typeface with half the internet. I wanted to move away from that, and away from the generic feel of tech.
After some verbal brainstorming I landed on something I described internally as a "surf flow state." We're a Sydney company. Nobody in the office really surfs. It did feel slightly on the nose, but it was the most accurate shorthand I had for what I was after: something coastal, spacious, decaffienated — that quality of flow that Vouch is designed to give you in your work.
The key material decision was texture. I applied film grain overlays throughout — not for nostalgia, but to give digital surfaces some tangibility. I referenced specific film stocks to adjust image levels, which gives the photography a sense of familiarity you can feel without being able to name.
On photography: we had no time and no budget for a shoot. I'd been investigating AI image generation and had built a set of references and prompts I trusted. We used Visual Electric and around 90% of what came out was more than fit for purpose. All of it got the grain treatment.
I produced a full set of vector icons and shapes — designed to look hand-drawn rather than geometric. A wave motif emerged that we ended up using everywhere. The whole thing launched alongside the new module, Recruiter Enablement. It was a super busy period, but again, we got it done in-house.
The website
Across three years I designed — or redesigned — almost every page of the Vouch site. Homepage, feature pages, case study templates, campaign landing pages. Each rebrand meant a full pass in Figma: working out how the new identity would function at scale before it touched a browser.
The build sat with a Webflow development agency I worked closely with throughout. My job was to design with enough specificity that they weren't making decisions that should have been mine — component structure, spacing logic, responsive behaviour. I stayed across the implementation, QA-ing against the Figma files and flagging anything that diverged. Over time that relationship sharpened how I design for the medium: understanding Webflow quirks, and structuring handoffs in a way that made the gap between the two as small as possible.
What the job actually is
Working at an early-stage startup is as chaotic as advertised. Some weeks I'm producing hero visuals and animations for a product launch. Others I'm designing branded socks with a two-day turnaround, or standees for an event in another timezone. The most challenging brief I've had in the role was designing a prize wheel for a UK event. The probability maths nearly finished me.
The work is often executional. But being that close to the brand — even when strategy isn't fully formalised — means I can produce high-quality work quickly and keep it coherent. That's what I'm there for: credibility at pace.
I also function as a facilitator. At a company this size, people contribute ideas across roles. I made it a point to be the person who could help anyone realise something visual — a video, a web asset, a poster, whatever. That's been one of the best parts of the job.
I bring a lot of experience in video and audio production on the team. I step in on sound issues, video processing, editorial decisions, AI-assisted editing. Useful to know both sides of the tools.
Another aspect of the role is managing external content creators — social media influencers producing content for Vouch's channels. I wrote the briefs, reviewed the videos, and worked through feedback with them. Getting the brand into a creator's hands requires a different kind of brief than an internal one: tight enough that the output doesn't look like everything else they've made, loose enough that it still sounds like them.