House of Brands to a Branded House: Boston Scientific's Email Design System
COMPANY:
Boston Scientific
MY ROLES:
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Visual Design Lead
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Brand Standards
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Omnichannel Experience
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Design System
TEAM CREDITS:
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Katie Gadempsky, Marketing CLoud Product Owner
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Irina Muradian, Brand Manager
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The Entire BSC Production Team
During Boston Scientific’s enterprise-wide brand refresh, the email ecosystem was a critical touchpoint in need of alignment. With 12 medical specialty divisions operating independently, email communications varied widely in visual structure, brand presence, and user experience. Divisions often created their own templates, headers, and brand treatments, resulting in inconsistent messaging, diluted brand architecture, and a disjointed customer experience.
I was brought in to redesign the email marketing system to reflect the updated brand identity, bring clarity to brand hierarchy across communications, and address the production inefficiencies that were slowing deployment. Marketing Cloud workflows were overburdened, and teams were improvising in the absence of reusable components or centralized design standards, creating friction at every stage of execution.
To solve this, I developed a flexible email design system that aligned brand strategy with marketing automation. The system introduced reusable content blocks, standardized journey templates, and brand-aligned visual guidelines, establishing a scalable foundation for digital communications and future marketing expansion.
One Brand, One Roof
My first step was research; interviewing stakeholders and auditing dozens of emails across divisions. It became clear that teams were improvising in the absence of centralized design guidance, and production teams were bogged down by conflicting requests, unclear specs, and repeated technical issues.
To address this, I redesigned the email template structure to establish a clear visual hierarchy that positioned Boston Scientific as the primary brand while creating space for co-branded elements in a standardized, secondary system. Product wordmarks and sub-brand identifiers were moved from headers into the body content, supported by a consistent lockup style. This brought cohesion to communications across divisions and reinforced Boston Scientific’s role as the parent brand.
A visual system for presenting product promotions and wordmarks within the hero in ways that preserved brand integrity allowed communications to highlight product messaging clearly without letting it compete with or override the Boston Scientific brand in the header, giving teams a clear, consistent way to promote products without compromising the overall brand structure.
Libraries & Templates
Two Libraries, One System
I built parallel design libraries in Figma and Marketing Cloud, containing typography, color, graphic elements, and modular content blocks. This 1:1 relationship between design and production tools allowed the production teams to build emails perfectly aligned to the design provided using pre-styled modules, removing the burden of design decisions from their workflow.
Putting Brand into Practice
To support adoption of the system, I created an email style guide that outlined how to apply brand elements consistently across communications. It was tailored for multiple user types, from agencies to internal design teams to Marketing Cloud authors, with a visual structure that made it easy to navigate and reference without overwhelming detail.
The guide also helped align visual execution in email with the broader design system, translating brand principles into clear standards that could be applied in day-to-day production. It also addressed accessibility by introducing updated color and typography rules that met WCAG guidelines and resolved long-standing readability issues.
