Mortgage Choice · Brand / Campaign / Design systems
Following Mortgage Choice's acquisition by REA Group, I worked as the sole designer within the marketing team, responsible for translating the evolving brand across a national network of more than 1,000 brokers.
My work ranged from national campaign creative and print to product communications, events and brand systems, translating an established identity across very different audiences, channels and formats while keeping it recognisably realestate.com.au.
As Creative & Design Manager at Mortgage Choice, I was the sole designer within the marketing team, working across a national network of more than 1,000 brokers.
My role covered brand and campaign design, broker marketing, digital and print collateral, signage, templates and day-to-day brand support. Alongside the hands-on design work, I also looked for better ways to manage repeat requests and give brokers more control over their own local marketing without compromising the brand.
The Mortgage Choice brand was developed collaboratively by the wider brand team. My role was largely in applying and maintaining that system across the day-to-day needs of the business, from broker marketing and digital collateral through to physical environments.
One area I owned end to end was signage. I developed the signage guidelines for the national broker network, translating the core visual identity into practical rules that could work across very different shopfronts, offices and local environments while still creating a consistent national presence.
Supporting more than 1,000 brokers meant producing a wide range of everyday marketing - flyers, social content, brochures, campaigns, local-area material and broker-specific assets.
Marketing, legal and compliance teams supplied the content, while I designed most of the broker-facing assets and templates. Over time, I built and organised these into a more structured library so repeat work could be reused and customised rather than designed from scratch each time.
We initially used Canva for self-service templates and later moved the library to Marq. My role in that transition was primarily on the creative and technical side: reviewing and reorganising the templates, redesigning them where needed, deciding which elements should remain locked or editable, and giving final visual and brand approval before they went live.
Mortgage Choice brokers run their own local businesses, so the system couldn't be completely rigid. Broker details, local offers, imagery and market-specific information needed room to change while the core visual structure stayed consistent.
The templates were designed around that balance - protecting the parts that made the work recognisably Mortgage Choice while giving brokers enough flexibility to make the material useful in their own market.
Self-service templates reduced a lot of repeat production work, but bespoke design requests still arrived with very different levels of information. That often meant chasing details before the work could even begin.
I chose Jotform as a better way to structure the briefing process, worked out what information was needed for different request types, built the forms and managed the workflow. I later worked with the implementation team to connect Jotform with Zendesk, so completed briefs automatically arrived in the design queue as structured tickets.
The combination of reusable templates, clearer rules and a more structured briefing process gave brokers greater independence while reducing repeat production work for the design team.
Around 40% of bespoke requests moved to approved self-service templates, while the new briefing workflow contributed to an estimated 33% improvement in turnaround time. More importantly, the system made it easier to support a network of more than 1,000 brokers without losing control of the brand.
