Context
A B2B services company with a steady volume of outbound sales activity (proposals, decks, one-pagers, case studies, campaign assets, social posts) but no internal design team. Every creative output went to an external agency or a rotating cast of freelance designers. The annual creative production bill sat in the mid-six figures.
The challenge
The output the company needed wasn’t bespoke design. It was consistently on-brand templated work, produced at speed:
- A new sales proposal pulled from the same structure, with content tailored to the prospect.
- A campaign one-pager built off the same visual system, refreshed for the season.
- A case study formatted exactly like the last twenty case studies, with the same call-out treatment.
- A pitch deck assembled from approved component slides.
The agency was producing all of this from scratch each time. Turnaround was 3–5 days. Cost per asset was $500–$2,500. Multiply by hundreds of assets per year and the math quickly stops working.
The right answer wasn’t to fire the agency for everything (some work genuinely benefits from a designer’s eye). The right answer was to absorb the routine 80% in-house, in software, on-brand by construction.
The approach
We codified the brand, fully, and built an agent that produces work against it.
Brand codification. Typography, color palette, logo treatment, voice, imagery rules, layout grids, component patterns. Everything that an external designer was inferring from existing assets each time, made explicit and machine-readable.
Template library. Every recurring asset type (sales deck, proposal, one-pager, case study, ad creative, social post) got a parameterized template. Content slots, structural rules, and design guardrails baked in.
The creative agent. Sits on top of the brand system and the template library. A request comes in via Slack (or directly into the document), the agent picks the right template, drafts the content against the brief, and generates the layout. First draft delivered in minutes, not days.
Approval flow. Routine work flows direct to the requester. Executive-facing or customer-facing work routes through a designated reviewer. Anything genuinely novel still escalates to a human designer, but that’s now the small minority of output.
Inside the system
The agent operates as a daemon integrated into the company’s Slack and Google Workspace environment.
- A request comes in: “Draft a one-pager for the [vertical] vertical positioning the [product line] capability for a CFO audience.”
- The agent retrieves the right template, drafts the content, generates supporting imagery from the brand-tuned image pipeline, assembles the layout, and delivers the output to a shared Drive folder.
- The requester gets a Slack message with the link. Routine work ships from there. Higher-stakes work routes to the reviewer, who gets the same link plus an approval action.
- Final assets go into the asset library, and the agent uses them as future training context for what “on-brand” actually means.
What it didn’t replace
The agency relationship still exists for genuinely novel work, brand evolution, and the occasional flagship campaign that warrants a designer’s full attention. But routine production (the work that was driving the bulk of the spend) now happens in-house, on-brand, in minutes. The agency engagement scopes down accordingly. The creative function delivers more output at a fraction of the cost.