From Product to Platform
Brand Strategy, Identity & Architecture
Company
TGR
Role
Lead Designer/Creative Director
Sole creative hire at a 30-person startup, functioning as Creative Director. Facilitated all brand strategy sessions with the CEO, COO, and VP of Sales — leading the brainstorms, setting the structure, synthesizing executive input into a coherent framework. Co-presented the strategy deck to leadership with a freelance collaborator.
Brand Strategy
Visual Identity
Brand Architecture
Industrial Design Philosophy
TGR stands for The Good Robot. Almost no one knew TGR existed. I built the brand, the strategy behind it, alongside concurrent responsibilities that included an app redesign, 120+ pages of technical documentation, and trade show designs across two brands.
Identity
All existing assets were unsalvageable. The logo exploration spanned three conceptual territories, Digitization, Coding, and Robotic Sensors, with 30+ directions explored before arriving at the chosen mark. The final logo uses Biennale Bold Regular modified: a single pixel cut from the letterforms between ‘t’ and ‘g’ reappears top left of the ‘t,’ a detail drawn from the concept of digitization that rewards close attention.
Brand Strategy
I facilitated all strategy sessions with the CEO, COO, and VP of Sales, structured brainstorms that drew out what leadership wanted and shaped it into something actionable. Working with a freelance collaborator as sounding board, I synthesized the output into a full strategic framework: purpose, positioning, brand pillars (Innovation, Human Impact, Scalable, Obsessed), personality, voice, and two taglines grounded in real customer testimony from EVS directors and hospital supervisors. The deck is now TGR’s living brand guideline.
Website
Strategy, UX, information architecture, UI design, and full Webflow build — in English, Chinese, and Spanish. TGR at the center; ADIBOT presented as a product line within it. The government of El Salvador found the company organically through the site and adopted TGR robots for public hospitals. Current partner roster includes Kaiser Permanente, Scripps, Honor Health, Texas Health Resources, UT Health San Antonio, and Alameda Health System.
Brand Guidelines
Produced directly after the website launch: logo usage rules, color and typography specs, and the formal ADIBOT sub-brand lockup — ‘ADIBOT, a division of TGR’ — giving every internal team and external vendor a single reference. The lockup is the car model architecture made visible in the actual brand system.
Industrial Design Philosophy
A governing framework authored for external design partners: Serviceability (foundational, must not be broken) → Usability (operational, must not be compromised) → Approachability (perceptual, preserve where possible). Enforceable rules, concrete examples, implementation guidance for geometry, proportion, material, and interaction. Translated into Chinese for manufacturing teams. Not a brand document, a product governance framework.
Challenge
TGR’s disinfection robot was developed under a different name, ADIBOT, and a European competitor was actively using its origin story against it in hospital procurement conversations. The confusion was costing real contracts.
Strategy
Retire ADIBOT as a brand identity. Reframe TGR as a platform company with product lines underneath using the car company model. Neutralize the origin confusion and build an architecture that scales to products that don’t exist yet.