Leading Design at Ergosign

Transformed agency culture and capabilities, leading 125 designers across 7 offices to strategic maturity.

Ergosign — Head of Design — DACH Region — 2019 - 2025

LOCAL SITUATION

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ABOUT

Ergosign is one of the largest design consultancies in the DACH region, with 20+ years of experience, 7 offices, and 220 employees. The company has successfully delivered 4,500+ projects across industries, combining 120 designers with 60 developers and multidisciplinary experts.

KEY ACHIEVEMENTS

Reframed Ergosign's design practice from a UX-focused agency into a strategic design consultancy with a globally competitive service portfolio. Introduced and scaled service design as a new discipline, broadening the company's impact beyond B2B productivity tools. Strengthened design maturity and confidence across the organization, resulting in new services, stronger positioning, and cultural transformation. Maintained Ergosign's strong UX DNA while expanding into areas comparable with leading global design firms.

GROWTH

Leading senior specialists across disciplines meant I had a continuously updated, reality-checked view of where design was moving. My role was to turn that knowledge into decisions — what to offer, what to stop, and what to invest in next — in a way that worked for very different clients and organizational contexts.

PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT

Working across a wide range of clients — different industries, sizes, and levels of maturity — forced me to rethink how design creates value beyond individual engagements. Establishing new services meant more than defining offerings; it meant making them understandable, situationally relevant, and credible in very different contexts.

SCALABILITY

That environment sharpened my ability to think in scalable services rather than bespoke solutions. It taught me how to translate complex design capabilities into structures organizations could adopt, invest in, and repeat — without losing rigor or ambition.

About

Key achievements

Growth

Portfolio management

Scalability

Strategic design

To introduce more strategic and ecosystem thinking beyond a purely user-centred perspective, I evolved the existing UX process into a broader end-to-end design framework. I integrated methods and activities from service design, research, strategy and validation across the different phases, giving teams a wider set of tools depending on the challenge. The framework was continuously tested and refined with the teams until it became a practical fit for the way we worked.

Re-brand

Visual Identity & Language
I led the rebrand of Ergosign, evolving the existing identity into a warmer, bolder and more active expression of the company. I introduced a more distinctive and readable typeface, developed a new color system based on the existing palette, and added gradients as a recurring visual principle to reflect the idea that almost everything we do is a process. The new identity was designed to make Ergosign feel less reserved and more confident in its role as a leading design company.

We designed a white label design system xOne

xOne White Label Design System

Designing a white label design system means defining much more than a component library. The system has to provide a stable foundation that can support different brands, products and teams without fragmenting over time. For xOne, we defined the system across several layers
Token architecture · Naming conventions · Component architecture · White-label theming · Library structure · Branching and releases · Governance · Documentation · Design and development alignment · Exports and tooling · Scaling the system

Design systems became a function

We established design systems as a dedicated field of expertise. Two designers owned the topic and, together with me, developed the system itself, workshop programs, working methods and sales materials. They also built a Figma community space where designers and developers could find current plugin recommendations and guidance on best practices. The content went beyond xOne and covered design systems more broadly, including architecture, tooling, documentation, governance and scaling.

Trainings catalog

I owned Ergosign’s training portfolio for design topics. The company already had a rich program of self-hosted one- to two-day trainings, with employees receiving a learning budget depending on their role. I continuously evolved the catalog to strengthen capabilities that I considered important for Ergosign’s future portfolio, establishing new training programs and running several of them myself.

Trainings I established

Typography · Figma · Design Systems · Design Strategy · Sustainable Innovation · Business Metrics for Designers · Healthcare Specialties & Trends · Animation

Existing trainings we continuously developed and kept up to date

Collaborative UX Design · UX Research · Interaction Design · Visual Design · DXP Projects · Accessibility · Agile for Designers · Industry Kickstarter

Processes & Quality Assurance

I was responsible for our quality gates and continuously adapted them to our evolving design processes in close collaboration with the respective specialists.
For a portfolio case, you can make the responsibility a little more tangible by adding what the quality gates actually did:
I owned the quality gates across our design process, defining and evolving review criteria together with the respective specialists. The gates ensured that work met our standards for research, UX, UI, accessibility and implementation readiness before moving into the next phase.