UNIFIED STORYTELLING ACROSS BRANDS
For Oprah Daily’s From Our Abuelas initiative, I led art direction for a business-wide editorial package celebrating heritage, wisdom, and culinary traditions. I crafted and enforced a visual style guide used across multiple Hearst brands, ensuring cohesion in photography, layout, and digital assets. The design elevated storytelling while uniting diverse editorial voices under one creative vision.
I. THE CHALLENGE
When Hearst decided to celebrate Latinx heritage through multiple editorial outlets, there was risk of visual fragmentation. The challenge was to deliver a unified design system that could flex across different brand voices, while preserving cultural authenticity and visual consistency.
They needed to ensure that each brand’s content felt connected, but not cookie-cutter — and that the design honored the depth of storytelling behind from our abuelas' narratives.
II. THE APPROACH
Conducted research into Latinx color symbolism, typography, and visual storytelling; selected a typeface from a Latinx type foundry to ground the package in authenticity.
Commissioned Niege Borges, a Brazilian-born Latinx illustrator, to create an illustrative framework and media kit for the landing page.
Designed a scalable system (illustrations, article headers, social graphics, video overlays) that maintained harmony across platforms while allowing flexibility for each brand.
Developed and enforced a comprehensive style guide, ensuring adoption across multiple Hearst brands.
III. THE EXECUTION
We rolled out the package across print, web, and social, applying the unified design language in each channel. Editorial layouts, social graphics, and video overlays all shared the same visual DNA, with Niege Borges’ illustrations serving as the throughline. Where brands had existing visual direction, the templates flexed to allow adaptation without losing coherence.
IV. THE IMPACT
The From Our Abuelas package became a standout editorial initiative across multiple Hearst properties. It strengthened brand alignment, elevated cultural storytelling, and gave each brand the tools to tell the story authentically. The design system proved both scalable and personal, creating a joyful, inclusive framework for heritage storytelling.