Projects/Content Studio
Content Studio
A campaign content tool for pharmaceutical marketing teams — designed to move at campaign speed inside a strict, high-stakes regulatory review process.
The brief in three lines.
Pharma marketing content moves through slow, high-stakes regulatory review — a tool built without that in mind just adds friction on top of an already careful process.
Design the content creation experience around the review workflow itself, not against it — clear structure, predictable states, and interfaces built to WCAG standards.
A tool marketing teams across four major pharma clients used to move campaign content through review with less confusion at each handoff.
Regulated industries can't move fast by cutting corners.
Working for clients like Pfizer, Sanofi, Amgen and Lilly means every piece of marketing content answers to a review process most industries don't have to think about — medical, legal, and regulatory sign-off, often across multiple stakeholders before anything goes out.
Content Studio existed to give marketing teams a structured way to create that content without the tool itself becoming another obstacle. The design challenge wasn't making it prettier — it was making the review-heavy process legible.
"In pharma, the interface can't just look finished — it has to make the approval trail obvious."
Delivery discipline, not just design craft.
Understand the product life cycle
Ensure high-fidelity designs moved into production on schedule, in a domain where delays have real business cost.
Present to product and leadership
Designs needed to hold up under review from stakeholders across multiple pharma clients, each with their own priorities.
Work agile, cross-functionally
Alongside UX designers, interaction designers, product managers, analytics and engineering — never in a design-only silo.
Wireframes that respected the review workflow.
Early wireframes mapped directly to how content actually moves through a pharma organisation — draft, internal review, medical/legal/regulatory sign-off, release. Rather than treating that as a technicality to route around, it became the backbone of the interface's structure, so status was always legible at a glance.
Map
Chart the real review workflow
Wireframe
Structure around review states
Prototype
Validate with product and client teams
Hi-Fi
Full visual design in Adobe XD / Sketch
Handoff
Documented specs via Zeplin
The content's journey mattered as much as the marketer's.
Two people experience this tool very differently — the marketer building the asset, and the reviewer approving it. The journey had to work for both without becoming two separate products.
Brief
KickoffCampaign brief received. Template chosen, not built.
Draft
CreationLocked zones prevent drift. Compliance by construction.
Internal Review
CheckpointInline validation catches gaps before submission.
MLR Approval
High stakesStatus visible to everyone. No "where is this stuck?"
Release
OutcomeExported, audit trail intact. Ready for every channel.
How much freedom should the editor actually allow?
The central tension: creative flexibility versus regulatory safety. Every concept was really a different answer to how much control to hand the marketer.
Freeform canvas
Maximum creative control — but nothing stopped a locked disclaimer from being accidentally moved or resized.
ParkedGuided template flow
Locked zones shown as visually distinct from editable ones. Marketers described it as "hard to get wrong."
SelectedComponent library picker
Powerful for advanced users, but the extra panel added a learning curve most marketers didn't need.
ParkedStructure argued about before a single pixel was styled.
The riskiest screens got wireframed first — the ones where getting the structure wrong would mean re-litigating compliance logic later.
A system built to make compliance visible.
Status colour-coding did real work here — it's what let a reviewer glance at a queue and know exactly what needed their attention.
Colour tokens
Primary
Ink
Surface
Approved
In Review
Rejected
Type scale
Component states
The tool, in the hands of a marketing team.
Two decisions that shaped the work.
Status made visible at every stage
Rather than hiding review state behind a status field, the interface surfaced exactly where a piece of content sat in the approval chain at all times — reducing the "where is this stuck?" questions that eat up time in regulated workflows.
One interaction language across four different clients
Pfizer, Sanofi, Amgen and Lilly each had their own brand and internal process quirks — but the underlying interaction patterns stayed consistent, so the design system didn't have to be reinvented for every new client engagement.
A tool built around the process it served.
Review status made visible throughout, reducing ambiguity about where content sat in the approval chain.
A shared interaction language reused across four major pharma clients rather than rebuilt for each.
Interfaces designed to WCAG accessibility standards as a baseline requirement, not an afterthought.
Design decisions that held up under review from product, leadership, and client stakeholders alike.
What this project reinforced.
Constraints are the actual design brief
The regulatory review process wasn't an obstacle to design around — understanding it thoroughly was most of the job.
Consistency across clients takes discipline
It's tempting to let every client engagement become a bespoke design. Holding a shared interaction language kept the work sustainable.
Visibility reduces anxiety in high-stakes workflows
When people can see exactly where something stands, they stop asking — and start trusting the system.