General Mills
Enterprise-scale always-on social for General Mills, built as a repeatable design system rather than a collection of isolated posts. The work created a modular visual and motion system that could scale across brands, channels, formats, and recurring content needs while staying brand-correct and platform-native.
Role •
Creative Director
Year •
2023
The Problem
General Mills needed social output that could move at the speed and volume of always-on publishing without losing coherence.
The challenge was not simply to make more content. It was to create a system that could support multiple brands, recurring formats, different channel behaviors, and shifting priorities while still preserving brand craft.
Without a clear operating structure, social work can fragment quickly: different formats, different stakeholders, different timelines, and different production needs all pulling the brand in slightly different directions.
The problem was repeatability. The work needed to give teams enough structure to move quickly while leaving enough flexibility for recipes, tips, seasonal moments, product stories, and trend-responsive content.
The Idea
Build a modular social design system for enterprise-scale publishing.
The system treated social as a repeatable creative operation: visual rules, motion behaviors, template families, format logic, and craft standards that could hold up across channels and production cycles.
Betty Crocker was the primary expression shown, with additional support across Pillsbury, Old El Paso, Annie’s Homegrown, and Ratio Foods.
The goal was not to make every post look the same. It was to create enough shared grammar for the work to remain recognizable, useful, and platform-native at volume.
The Execution
The work turned recurring content needs into a modular system that could support recipes, tips, seasonal moments, product stories, and platform-specific adaptations.
System in use
The visual system carried across identity surfaces, story formats, recipe posts, Pinterest, email, web, and display while keeping Betty Crocker recognizable at speed.
Social posts
Feed-based recipes, tips, product moments, and seasonal content used repeatable layouts to keep high-volume publishing consistent.
Constraints Navigated
The work turned always-on social into a repeatable brand system: structured enough to protect coherence, flexible enough to support different brands, formats, and publishing needs.
The Results
The proof was operational rather than award-based: a repeatable social system that helped keep high-volume output coherent across brands, formats, and production cycles.
The work showed how enterprise social can move beyond disconnected posts into a managed creative operating system: consistent enough to protect the brand, flexible enough to serve different content needs, and structured enough to reduce production and approval churn.
What It Demonstrates Now
This case shows the shift from creative execution to creative systems leadership.
The work was not only about designing social assets. It was about building operating logic around brand expression: rules, templates, workflows, approvals, and craft standards that helped teams produce more without making the brand feel different every week.
It demonstrates how creative systems can protect coherence when communication becomes faster, more distributed, and more dependent on repeatable structures.
Previous Case
Next Case