I led the creation of Topcon’s collateral design system, a comprehensive suite of InDesign templates and visual standards built to unify and streamline all marketing and corporate materials. This system established a cohesive framework across brochures, datasheets, case studies, flyers, and other print and digital collateral, ensuring every touchpoint reflected the same level of precision and professionalism as our products. Designed in alignment with Topcon’s overarching brand principles of clarity, innovation, and human-centric precision, the system introduced consistent typography, grid structures, and modular layouts that balanced technical information with accessible, visually engaging design. The result is a scalable platform that allows teams worldwide to produce materials efficiently while maintaining a unified and recognizable brand voice.
The design process for the collateral system began with an extensive competitive audit and design study focused on best practices for literature and publication design across the industry. We analyzed how leading brands organized technical information, balanced visuals with data, and built flexible systems that could scale across global teams. In addition, we conducted a deep review of all existing collateral across the Topcon ecosystem to identify common content structures and shared needs, ensuring the new system would serve every region and business unit effectively. Drawing inspiration from the atomic design methodology often used in web and product design, we applied the same modular thinking to print. Each layout element—such as grids, typographic hierarchies, callouts, and imagery systems—was treated as a reusable component that could be combined and repurposed to create consistency across a wide range of collateral. This approach established a unified design language that balanced scalability, efficiency, and creativity within a structured system.
A look behind the process: early stages of developing the Topcon Collateral Design System. From conducting a competitive audit to mapping our own content through an atomic design approach, every step helped define a smarter, more modular framework. The final chart shows how the new system connects teams and asset types across the organization, creating one unified visual language for all collateral.
Project highlight and takeaway
It was incredibly rewarding to see our hard work pay off. Every detail was thoughtfully refined, and now our team can create assets faster and with greater design consistency.
The outcome of this project has been transformative for our team. By investing the time to refine every detail, we created a collateral system that not only looks cohesive but also functions efficiently in real-world use. At the heart of this system is a main component document that serves as a centralized library in InDesign, allowing users to pick and pull elements, copy styles, and build new materials with consistency and ease. This approach was something I hadn’t seen done elsewhere, and I felt our team brought an innovative, digital way of thinking into the more traditional world of print design. The result is a smarter, faster, and more cohesive design process that has elevated both the quality and consistency of everything we produce.
_logo.svg.png){kind=logo}
