Agency Design · 2026
Design, From the Ground Up
In January 2024 I became the first full-time designer at Sumeru, a 500-person consulting firm, with one mandate: build a design practice from nothing. Two years later it's a five-person team, a proprietary design system, an award-winning redesign, and AI woven into how we work. Here's the story, chapter by chapter.
- Timeline
- 2023 → now
- Team
- 2 → 5 designers
- Company
- Sumeru · 500+ · LA
- Recognition
- 2025 Web Excellence Award
Sep–Dec 2023 · The proof
It started as a consulting gig. I took on an astrology-services platform for the Art of Living's Jyotis Vastu Academy, and it surpassed everyone's expectations. That one project is why the door opened.
Jan 2024 · Day one
I officially joined as Sumeru's first full-time designer, alongside one contractor we'd worked with for years. The mandate was simple and daunting: build a design practice from scratch, which meant finding the clients and the projects myself. My first win was a $150, one-week job. That client is still a partner more than two years later.
2024 · Rewiring how design happens
Alongside hunting for new work, I rebuilt how design actually got done. We used Figma internally, but clients still marked up PDFs. I moved feedback into Figma itself: live comments, real-time workshops, one source of truth. It ended the editable-PDF exports and the hundreds of conflicting file versions overnight.
2024 · Design in the DNA
I was invited into Sumeru's rebrand, modernizing a 20-year-old logo and the materials around it. The harder part came next: making design part of the company's DNA.
Every pre-sales asset, marketing piece, landing page, and email now pulls from one system of primitives and styling, where before it was a hundred personal takes on the brand. Sumeru runs on a proprietary design system that dictates all creative.
End of 2024 · Traction
By the close of the year the bet was paying off. We had delivered for more than twenty new client partners and made our first hire, a designer in Europe.
2025 · Scale
2025 was about expanding the grind. We closed the year at 125% year-over-year growth, added an on-shore designer in Los Angeles, and partnered with sales through a full RFP to win a major account in an industry we had never worked in before.
2025–2026 · The AI leap
Then AI swept the industry, and I have never been more excited to be a designer. The team is five now, up from two when I joined. We stopped talking about AI and started building with it, three tools in particular.
Sales creative, on tap
A Claude skill that reads our knowledge base and drives the Figma MCP to build decks and one-pagers. It is about 70% of the way there, not perfect yet, but it cut the team's sales-asset time from 750 hours in Q1 to 400.
Email, design to dev
A custom Figma plugin that turns email designs into production-ready builds, for two regulated industries reaching 50M+ customers a year.
See the Email at Scale projectA brand agent
A design agent with its own frontend and a Slack app. Anyone at Sumeru can ask a brand question about us or any client and get an answer back, with live Figma links pulled through the Figma REST API.
Where it stands
What started as a one-person bet is now an award-winning practice with a team, a system, and a seat in the pre-sales process. The ODUGlobal redesign, led with KWall, won a 2025 Web Excellence Award.
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