Canva
As Country Creative Lead for the UK and Türkiye, I spent over four years building and leading an eight-person creative team while establishing the local creative direction across campaigns, content ecosystems and product surfaces.
My work centred on translating global brand and product strategy into culturally relevant creative systems. Rather than approaching projects as isolated outputs, I developed scalable frameworks that enabled speed, consistency and creative quality across an evolving SaaS platform.
Operating across the full end-to-end journey — from research and strategic thinking through to concept development and final production — I drove coherence across surfaces, formats and contexts.
Research and cultural insight informed the work throughout. I led initiatives to interpret global narratives through a local lens, shaping outputs that were authentic, contextually aware and culturally respectful. This required particular sensitivity to cultural interpretation, representation and appropriation when adapting global campaigns for different audiences.
Working at the intersection of brand, product and systems, I partnered closely with marketing, product and regional stakeholders to balance creative ambition with platform constraints, supporting both local relevance and global consistency as the product and organisation scaled.
- Addressing diverse, global user needs through championing design quality and relevance in the Canva library.
- Providing leadership in global and local cultural design considerations.
- Campaign leadership: creating briefs based on data and research.
- Produce and integrate effective & efficient design practices.
- Hiring and directing talents to meet partner needs whilst inspiring and developing our talented freelancers to create high-quality designs.
- Review, feedback and publish bespoke elements and templates.
- Using data-driven insights and metrics to ensure we’re aligning with company goals.
- Analysing user experience and launching targeted campaigns with relevant prospects.
