Leading the Creation of Lexmark Brand Central
How content strategy, team facilitation, and cross-functional execution helped transform outdated brand guidelines into a centralized public-facing resource on Adobe Experience Manager.
Project Snapshot
Company: Lexmark
Platform: Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)
Duration: ~6 months
Role: Manager, Global Marketing Design Team
Team: 15-person global marketing design team
Project Overview
Lexmark needed to modernize its brand guidelines and make them easier to access, easier to understand, and easier to maintain. The previous guidelines had become outdated, overly complex, and were located behind a login, which created friction for the audiences who needed them most.
The goal was to create Lexmark Brand Central, a new public-facing brand site on Adobe Experience Manager that would serve internal stakeholders, global regional teams, and third-party agencies with a centralized source for brand standards and resources. The live site explicitly describes Brand Center as Lexmark’s “single source of truth” for brand standards, visual identity guidance, and related information for internal and external audiences. (Lexmark Brand Center)
This project also carried platform significance: Brand Central was the first site launched on Lexmark’s new AEM environment, which meant the content effort had to progress alongside parallel technology and environment setup workstreams.
The Challenge
This was not simply a website refresh. The project required the team to create an entirely new body of content while also deciding what information mattered most for launch.
Several constraints shaped the work:
- existing brand guidance needed to be updated and simplified
- content development had stalled for several months
- the team faced competing priorities and limited bandwidth
- AEM platform setup and development were happening in parallel
- the site needed to serve both internal teams and external partners
The live site now includes major content areas such as overview, visuals, messaging and writing, video and motion, and web components, reflecting the breadth of the initiative.
My Role
At the time, I was Manager of the Global Marketing Design Team, leading a 15-member team.
My contribution centered on design leadership and content strategy. I was responsible for organizing the work, setting direction for how content creation should begin, helping the team identify the most important topics, and creating the conditions for stalled work to move forward.
The UX team defined the site structure, page hierarchy, and navigation. My role was to lead the content effort, guide the team through focused development, and coordinate with the technology team as the new AEM environment was being established.
Leadership Approach
The biggest risk in the project was not technical complexity alone. It was the combination of competing priorities and limited team bandwidth.
To address that, I shifted the team from loosely distributed effort to a more focused and structured model. Rather than trying to solve the entire content challenge at once, I concentrated the team around priority topics and created a defined process for generating momentum.
This leadership approach helped transform a stalled initiative into an executable body of work.
The Content Sprint That Unblocked the Work
Content development had been stalled for a few months, so I organized a dedicated sprint week for four team leads to focus exclusively on content creation.
The sprint used an agile-style workflow and included:
- an opening collaboration session to align on goals and direction
- identification of the highest-priority content areas
- deep-work time dedicated to drafting new material
- morning and afternoon standups to demonstrate progress, align guidelines, and discuss challenges
- an end-of-week demo to gather feedback and shape future iterations
This structure gave the team a practical starting point and produced a core foundation of content that the broader team could continue building on. After the initial sprint, the work expanded to include four additional team members, bringing the total number of contributors to eight.
Content Strategy
The content strategy focused on simplification, prioritization, and accessibility.
- Simplify the guidelines.
The existing brand guidance had become too complex. The new approach focused on making core standards more scannable, usable, and relevant to the audiences applying them. - Prioritize essential content first.
The team scoped the effort around realistic capacity and identified the core content needed for launch before expanding further. - Use a hybrid publishing model.
We made a deliberate decision to publish essential guidance as web pages and provide deeper documentation as PDFs for users who needed more detail. The live site includes downloadable PDF documentation alongside the web content. (Lexmark Brand Center)
This model made the site easier to use day to day while still supporting teams and partners who needed more in-depth reference material.
Scope of the Work
The content scope included:
- general brand guidelines
- logo usage
- colors
- typography
- photography
- illustrations
- video and motion graphics
- web components
Later in the process, the messaging team collaborated to add messaging guidance. The live site now includes both “Writing” and “Messaging” sections in addition to visual and component guidance.
Execution
From kickoff to launch, the project took approximately six months. That timeline included parallel workstreams because the same team members were also involved in helping establish the AEM platform and associated environments.
Content was initially written in Word documents, then laid out in Adobe as both web pages and more detailed PDFs. The final implementation used out-of-the-box AEM capabilities, including DAM support.
Because the site was the first launch on the new AEM environment, execution required close coordination between:
- global marketing leadership
- UX, design, art direction, and video production
- technology partners responsible for AEM setup and development
- messaging stakeholders contributing later-phase content
Outcome
Lexmark Brand Central replaced an outdated, login-protected, and overly complex set of brand guidelines with a clearer, more centralized resource.
The final result delivered:
- a new public-facing brand site on AEM
- easier access to brand guidance for internal teams and third-party agencies
- a simpler structure for applying brand standards
- a foundational content system that could continue evolving over time
- an official source of truth for Lexmark brand standards prior to the Xerox acquisition
Lexmark Brand Center facilitated brand consistency across touchpoints and provided the building blocks needed to create cohesive materials across channels and media.
Operationally, the project also helped reduce friction by making guidance and related resources easier to find, even though that reduction was not formally quantified.
Why This Project Matters
The significance of this work is in the leadership model behind it.
This project demonstrates my ability to:
- identify when important work is stalled
- create a process to unblock progress
- guide team leads through structured collaboration
- prioritize content under constrained capacity
- coordinate across design, UX, messaging, and technology
- turn a complex brand-governance need into a practical digital resource
The strongest outcome was not just the launch of a site. It was the creation of a sustainable content foundation and a cross-functional process that enabled the work to happen.
Key Capabilities Demonstrated
- Design Team Leadership
- Content Strategy
- Enterprise Brand Governance
- Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Agile Team Facilitation
- AEM Content Planning
- Digital Brand Systems
- Stakeholder Alignment
Summary
Led the creation of Lexmark Brand Central, a new public-facing brand guidelines platform and the first site launched on Lexmark’s new AEM environment. As manager of a 15-person global marketing design team, I drove content strategy, organized a focused sprint to unblock stalled work, aligned contributors around priority topics, and helped transform outdated login-protected brand guidance into a centralized resource for internal teams and external partners. The resulting platform became Lexmark’s official source of truth for brand standards and related resources. Brand Center is Lexmark’s centralized brand resource for internal teams and third-party audiences.