Theorem Inc

Theorem is a global managed services company that helps brands, publishers and agencies operate in digital — ad ops and programmatic, marketing cloud, data strategy, creative services, consultancy. They brought me on as a freelance digital designer in mid-2020 to redesign the marketing website, and the engagement ran for about a year.

The website was the starting point, not the scope. It grew into the type system the rest of the team designed against, the annotated files their developers built from, the infographics behind an automation content series, and the ebook template their marketing team used to publish it.

• I was designing into a pipeline, not delivering a file. The build was handled by other people — an internal producer in Santo Domingo, an outside studio, in-house developers. Anything ambiguous in my handoff became someone else's guess.
• More than one designer was working on the same site. Without a shared type system, four people's pages drift apart. The Art Director asked me to write one specifically so the rest of the team had something to design against.
• The copy arrived after the design. Homepage copy was still being revised while layouts were in round three, so the design had to hold up under text that hadn't been written yet — then reflow across three breakpoints when it landed.
• Theorem sells things you can't photograph. Programmatic ad operations and data strategy have no product shot. The site had to make an abstract managed service feel concrete to a buyer at a brand, a publisher or an agency — three different buyers — across three regions.
• The infographics had to explain operations, not decorate them. Campaign management workflow, automation workflow, the balance between human and machine — these were real internal processes that had to become something a reader could follow in one pass.

1. Delivered the first homepage six days after kickoff. Then took it through three rounds, working from the team's consolidated feedback rather than a stream of individual opinions.
2. Extended the redesign across the site. About, Work, Blog and case study page layouts, so the homepage wasn't a good page attached to an old site.
3. Designed every page at three breakpoints. Desktop, tablet and mobile, rather than designing desktop and leaving the other two to be interpreted during the build.
4. Wrote the type style guide. H1 through CTA, defined so multiple designers working in parallel produced pages that matched — the fix for a consistency problem before it became one.
5. Specified the contact form as a qualification tool. Service interest as a multi-select, region as a single select, so an inbound enquiry arrived already routed rather than as a name and a message.
6. Engineered the handoff. Annotated development notes on every layout, pixel-perfect files delivered through InVision, and packaged web assets — built so a developer who had never spoken to me could build it correctly.
7. Learned the build tool on my own initiative. When development moved to Elementor, I bought and worked through the course so I could design in step with the developers instead of handing over and hoping.
8. Designed the automation content series graphics. Infographics mapping campaign management and automation workflows, and the human-machine balance piece, translating internal process documents into explanatory graphics.
9. Built the ebook as a master template. The first ebook shipped, and the template behind it meant the marketing team could publish the rest of the series themselves.

• Theorem's marketing site was rebuilt from the homepage through the About, Work, Blog and case study pages, at three breakpoints.
• A distributed team — New Jersey, Santo Domingo, an outside studio and in-house developers — worked from one type system and one set of annotated files.
• The ebook master template turned a one-off deliverable into a publishing capability: marketing could produce the automation series without a designer in the loop each time.
• What began as a website redesign ran about a year and expanded into content design, infographics and templates.