Powered by League

The problem became clear with PC Health, League's first Powered by League customer. They had their own illustration style, their own email needs, and my team was absorbing all of it—new layouts, new imagery, new designs on a near-weekly basis. We hadn't even signed the next customer yet. Something had to change. The product design team had their own design system, why couldn't brand and content have one too?

The solution was two connected systems: a theme-able illustration library and a component-ized email design system, built to work together and designed from the ground up to be reskinned for any brand.

The illustration library was built on modular, recombinable parts—people, objects, scenes, backdrops—all designed to be remixed. The colour system followed the same discipline: three brand colours, three neutrals, three skin tones. Enough to reflect real diversity without fragmenting the system into something unmanageable. Large enough to accommodate any client's palette; tight enough to stay in control. As the library grew, we stopped needing a dedicated illustrator for new content—existing assets could be recombined instead. Eventually product designers could piece together their own illustrations without submitting a ticket to my team.

The email system worked the same way. Standardized templates and components with variation built in. My job was to establish a new customer's theme—setting styles, reviewing with the client—then apply it across the full template set. After that, I could step back. Non-designer marketing leads took it from there. I'd QA and consult, but I wasn't the bottleneck.

Before the system, onboarding a new customer took weeks, sometimes months. After, it took days—sometimes hours. Net-new email designs that once required a week of back-and-forth now took hours. What the system really changed, though, was how my team operated. We stopped reacting to briefs and started owning a platform.