Design systems aren’t just for products or editorial, they’re just as powerful in campaign work, especially when you need to scale across formats, messages, and environments. This project, I completed back in 2019, for National Citizen Service (NCS) and Future Foundations was exactly that kind of challenge, and the design and system still holds up today. The project needed to work as a summer brochure series for multiple Colleges and education providers in Derbyshire. This included posters, banners and a system that could stretch across multiple messages, locations, and touch-points. Most importantly, it needed to speak to a young audience and retain an energetic, optimistic, and social feel without being overly polished. Looking across the posters and brochure, the variety is obvious. Different images, different colours, different layouts, but underneath that variation is a consistent system doing the heavy lifting. A bold, repeatable typographic treatment with a set of colour blocks that carry messaging that has a clear hierarchy structure for key phrases. Each output feels different and controlled variation is the goal of a good system.

One of the key decisions in this system was treating phrases as building blocks, instead of designing each poster from scratch, the messaging itself became modular. This allowed the campaign to feel playful and spontaneous, while still being completely system-driven. The colour palette does more than make things feel vibrant, it organises the system. Because colour is applied consistently at a structural level, you can swap palettes, remix layouts, and still maintain recognition. The brochure isn’t a separate design, it’s an extension of the same system and this is where design systems really prove their value. Different formats with one coherent voice. This design system turns campaign messaging into modular building blocks, so the work can scale, adapt, and stay consistent without losing its energy.