Tools I built to do the work

I joined Olarm just as the brand was refreshed, with new colours and new shapes. As the only designer, I rolled it out across marketing and the wider business, and developed it further over two years.

The problem

Over those two years, different versions of the guide were circulating, along with guides other departments had made themselves. People built assets from whichever version they had, and the brand started to drift.

Getting everyone aligned

I met with each department to agree what one unified guide needed to cover, and we gathered it all in Google Slides. Then other priorities took over, and the project paused for almost a year.

Claude Design changed the timeline

When Claude Design launched, I picked the guide back up. I took our baseline guide, added references from well-structured brand guides and built the framework in Claude. I presented it to leadership, and they were keen to go.

Built with the people who use it

I ran live-edit sessions with department heads and specialists to learn how each team actually works with the brand, recorded and transcribed with Gemini in Google Meet.

I turned the transcripts into Markdown files, combined them with the research from the year before and built out the full guide. It was refined and working within six to eight weeks.

What it covers

Seven guides in one place: brand foundation, graphic design, UX and UI, industrial design, space design, videography, and audio and sound design, with packaging next.

Together they hold Olarm’s ways of thinking, principles and rules, and how the brand looks, sounds and speaks.

Olarm MAX 2 is a new product, in testing with customers before it ships. I built its packaging in Claude to see what the 3D tools could do, and how they could help with design and approval.

It started as a simple box I could place artwork on, while industrial design handled the physical box: space, tolerance and fitment.

Checking a design used to mean printing it and sticking it on a dummy box, which took days. Now I could bring the artwork into Claude Design and see it on the real form in hours, for my own review and for stakeholders.

Then I pushed it further. Industrial design supplied the die lines, and Claude Design built the full packaging structure from them, down to the last crease and fold.

• Days to hours: artwork checked on the real form, not on a dummy box.
• Built from the real die lines: every crease, fold and tuck, with the product and insert inside.
• Structure and graphics reviewed together, digitally, without building box after box.
• Weeks saved in iteration and review, with every stakeholder seeing every step.

Once I knew what Claude could do in 3D, I used it to design Olarm’s own battery sleeves. I built an environment around the cylindrical CR123A form, designed the sleeve flat in Illustrator, and brought it into Claude Design to wrap around the battery.

Mocking this up for real is hard, because wrapping a battery means dealing with its shape and curve. This gave us a true view of the sleeve on the batteries Olarm sells for its devices, so stakeholders could give proper feedback before it went for sampling and sign-off.

• Flat artwork in, wrapped battery out: the Illustrator layout wraps the real CR123A form.
• “Artwork flat” slides the wrap off the cell to check the print layout.
• Decisions made before sampling, not after.

The catalogue was designed for an event, for people to pick up and take with them. It explains Olarm’s products and what they offer.

Security is a technical industry that usually isn’t customer-facing. The challenge was to make it visually compelling and easy to understand without technical knowledge, while still speaking to the people who work with this technology every day.

There are two editions: End user (36 pages) and ARC and installer (48 pages). To review them, I built a viewer in Claude that gives stakeholders the feel of flipping through the booklet, page by page or in spreads.

The viewer also opens any PDF: try “My PDF”.