Enhancing Brand Identity through Character Customization

vector image showcasing a logo applied on various clothing items including on a polo shirt, tank top, and helmet alongside an image of Vyond Studio UI for adding logos

My Role

Role: Lead UX Designer, from solution pitch to launch

Team: Design manager (final review), UI designer, copywriter, PM, 3 engineers, plus data for analytics tracking

Timeline: Solution pitch in May 2024 → launched September 2024

What I owned:

  • Co-wrote the solution pitch with our PM to scope the feature and get buy-in

  • Wrote the UX functional spec and kept it up to date through six rounds of revisions

  • Designed the full flow: adding, placing, and editing logos, saving and sharing logo’d characters, plus upgrade prompts for users on ineligible plans

  • Expanded scope mid-project to support logos on headgear

  • Made the key interaction calls: building on the existing Character Color panel, designing placement controls around the no-drag-and-drop constraint, and auto-reopening the panel after a logo is picked

Introduction

Vyond is an AI-powered video platform built for businesses. As more enterprise teams came to rely on us, a pattern started showing up:

our users wanted characters that looked like their brand.

Not just in tone or story, but literally logo tees and all.

The Problem

Big teams = bulkier brand guidelines.

Our enterprise users needed every frame of their videos to follow their company’s strict brand rules, and they needed an easy way to get there.

Without one, videos drifted off-brand, and teams lost time chasing consistency across every piece of content.

And they kept asking. Logos on characters was one of our most-requested enterprise features, and competitors were starting to offer it.

Target Audience

We designed this mainly for enterprise users—comms teams, learning & development pros, and marketers—who needed their videos to look unmistakably like their brand.

They usually worked inside structured brand systems and wanted tools that gave them room to be creative without losing control.

Persona

👤 Poppy Smith

Poppy is a senior content strategist at a global telecommunications company. She churns out internal onboarding and training videos all year long. Her company’s brand guidelines are strict: logos go on the left chest of uniforms and never overlap seams or other graphics. Even tiny slip-ups get flagged at quarterly audits.

“I want to apply logos to character outfits in a way that automatically aligns with our brand standards,
so I can reduce review time, eliminate compliance errors, and produce polished content at scale.”
— Poppy Smith

Persona Goals

  • Help her team make branded videos faster

  • Cut down on logo compliance errors in character outfits

  • Spend less time going back and forth with legal and brand teams

Persona Pain Points

  • Adding logos by hand across scenes and outfits is tedious and easy to mess up

  • No guardrails—easy to misplace or resize logos incorrectly

  • Hours lost in review fixing inconsistent logos

Product Goals

  • Make it easy—even delightful—to brand characters with logos.

  • Keep the learning curve minimal.

  • Make sure the final visuals are polished, flexible, and on-brand.

Process

We started by digging into the existing customization workflow to see where users got stuck when adding logos or brand marks.

The goal: something that slotted right into the experience users already knew, so nobody needed extra training.

We already had a good read on how users think from interviews and other research, so I broke the feature into four phases, each matched to a specific user need.

Step 1: Understand the Flow

Instead of inventing a whole new interaction model, we built on what users already did. They were used to tweaking characters in the right-side style panel, and we’d just launched a panel for character colors, so adding logo settings there was the natural next step.

Putting it there also tapped into the “Joy of Discovery.” Users got to feel like they’d “found” the new tool themselves, right inside the way they already made videos.

Step 2: Lean on What Works

To keep the tool easy to learn, we couldn’t throw every design control under the sun at users. So we kept it simple: reposition, resize, rotate. That way, users could take in the settings panel at a glance and still get the look they wanted.

Because of how character elements render on the canvas, drag-and-drop wasn’t an option. Our workaround was a mix of dropdown menus and pixel-level inputs.

Users could pick a placement area (headgear, body, right arm, etc.), then fine-tune size, rotation, and position until it looked clean and consistent.

Step 3: Design for Constraints, Not Against Them

From design crits to solution pitches to usability tests, we kept honing it.

One thing we learned: users didn’t want to lose their place mid-task. So when they picked a logo from the left panel, the right-side Color/Logo panel popped back open automatically.

This auto-redirect was a first for our Studio. It broke our usual pattern of keeping the left and right panels completely separate, but for this feature, it just made sense. Little touches, big wins.

Step 4: Test, Iterate, Re-test

Result

Before, branding a character meant one of three workarounds:

  • Asking our customer success team to get our animators to do it

  • Adding the logo in separate software

  • Placing a logo on top of the character, which broke the moment the character moved

Now it’s one flow, right inside Studio.

The feature launched in September 2024, right on our Q3 target, and the response was great:

  • Several enterprise accounts upgraded their plans just to get access.

  • Users called out how intuitive the flow was—no documentation needed.

  • Teams loved how “on-brand” their content suddenly looked.

How did we help Poppy?

Here’s what the design set out to solve for her:

🧩 Placement guidance snaps logos to brand-approved spots, with sizing safeguards built in.

🎯 Poppy gets branding done faster.

🎯 Her non-designer teammates feel confident adding logos on their own.

🧩 Reusable branding templates and shareable characters with preset uniforms, ready to use across projects.

🎯 Fewer logo-related revision requests for her whole team.

🎯 Brand and legal can trust that new content will stay on-brand.

Conclusion

This project let me dig into what enterprise teams really need when they’re working inside defined visual systems. My key takeaways:

  • Creative tools don’t have to be complex.

  • Enterprise users appreciate when you sweat the small stuff.

  • Constraints aren’t blockers—they’re invitations to be clever.

  • And most importantly, you can make following brand guidelines fun.

Check it out yourself at Vyond.

Because of my NDA, I can’t share every detail of the work behind this project, but feel free to get in touch if you’d like to learn more!