A living brand asset library

Turned a static brand PDF nobody could use into a searchable, self-serve library — so any team could find the right logo, color, or icon without asking the design team.

Context

The brand guide lived in a PDF. Marketing, sales, and product all needed the same logos, colors, icons, and typography — and all of them dug through a shared drive, asked the design team, or guessed. The guide went stale the moment it exported, so even the people who found it weren’t sure it was current.

On paper, the problem was findability — hard-to-find assets. The real one ran deeper: no one trusted that what they found was correct.

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Before / after: the old brand PDF vs. the live library

The core transformation — a stale document next to the searchable, self-serve product. Real capture available from the live site (argano-asset-library.vercel.app).

Before and after — from a static PDF to a searchable library.

My role

I owned design end to end — research, information architecture, interface design, and the front-end build, working with the brand owners to define what “correct” meant for each asset.

Research & insight

I watched people from three teams hunt for assets. Two things stood out:

  • They searched by keyword and use-case (“dark logo,” “icon for security”), not the brand team’s categories.
  • Friction wasn’t just finding an asset — it was getting it in the right format (hex for a deck, CMYK for print) and trusting it was current.

So the job wasn’t a prettier PDF. It was a single, trustworthy, self-serve source in the users’ language.

Process & decisions

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The library home — search box + filterable asset grid

Shows the search-first landing and the categories drawn from a card sort. Capture the real homepage from the live site.

Search-first layout, with categories drawn from how teams actually search.

A few decisions shaped it:

  • Search-first, not catalog-first. A search box and filterable grid meet people where they start.
  • Categories from a card sort, not the brand team’s mental model — labels in users’ words.
  • Every asset copy-ready in every format. Colors show hex, RGB, CMYK, and Pantone, one-click copy.
  • It mirrors the source of truth automatically. Rather than a file someone must remember to update, it derives from the canonical design files — which is what solved the trust problem.
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A color detail — hex, RGB, CMYK, Pantone, one-click copy

Demonstrates 'copy-ready in every format' — the exact friction the library removed. Capture a real color view from the live site.

Each color, copy-ready in whatever format the task needs.

Outcome

The brand stopped being a document people distrusted and became something teams just use — anyone can grab the right asset from a URL, in the format they need, confident it’s current. The design team stopped fielding one-off requests.

The lasting win is the model: a brand resource that maintains its own accuracy, so consistency holds without anyone policing it.