Audit Commission, 2002 to 2008. Yes, it sounds dry. It wasn't. The job that taught me brand is built from the ground up, and that clarity is a public service.

I joined the Audit Commission in 2002 as a Senior Designer, which is a polite way of saying I was the person they handed things to when they needed them to look less like a government document and more like something a human being might actually read. It was a central government body responsible for financial accountability across the UK public sector, and the creative output covered print, digital, PR and broadcast for audiences ranging from finance directors to the general public. Not the most obvious place for a designer to fall in love with brand, but that's exactly what happened.

By 2005 I'd taken over as Design and Brand Manager, leading a team of senior and junior designers and shaping the visual communications across every channel the organisation touched. The brief, essentially, was to make the whole thing work properly. I led a full rebrand of the organisation, built brand governance from scratch and modernised the creative processes underneath it all. The result was better consistency, clearer output, and a turnaround time that made the studio something the rest of the organisation actually wanted to use rather than something they had to.

Six years there taught me two things I still carry around. First, that brand is a system, not a logo, and if the system doesn't work then the logo is just decoration. Second, that making something genuinely difficult feel effortless on the page is one of the hardest and most satisfying things you can do with design. If you can make financial accountability feel clear, trustworthy and occasionally even elegant, you can design almost anything.