Thiago Cruz
About
Nice to meet you. Or olá, as we say in Brazil.
I’m a Senior Brand Designer in São Paulo with 7 years designing for B2B. At McFadyen Digital, a commerce consultancy whose clients include ABB, Louis Vuitton and LEGO, I set the brand rules the company follows worldwide, design the sales and partner material seen at Adobe, Mirakl, Anthropic and Databricks, and run the AI workflows that keep 200+ people on-brand.
Now and then I take on single projects for LATAM brands, freelance and pro bono, building identities from the first sketch for national autism societies, law firms and public institutions.
Career
Four roles at McFadyen Digital since 2019.
Since 2019 I’ve worked full-time for McFadyen Digital as a remote contractor from Brazil. I started in production, took over the website and campaigns, then ran the design team’s pipeline. Today I look after the brand and the AI workflows that scale it across the company.
Production Designer
Marketing graphics for reports and white papers read by 2,000+ business leaders a year.
Brand Designer
Owned mcfadyen.com and 4 microsites (40+ pages), plus LinkedIn, ads and email campaigns.
Design Manager
Ran the design pipeline (800+ tasks a year), the 2025 Brand Manual and 15+ campaigns a year.
AI Senior Designer & Content Manager
Sep 2025 – nowBrand for 200+ people, scaled with AI skills and MCPs. Wrote the company’s AI image policy.
Process
How I work with AI.
The brand starts by hand in Figma and Adobe, then gets written down as one system: DESIGN.md, with the tokens, type, rules and the AI image policy I wrote. Claude Code reads it through skills, repos and MCPs, so websites, decks, campaign kits and AI visuals come out on-brand without being drawn one by one. I also train marketers and stakeholders to run these workflows themselves, with design skills built for what each team needs. Most of my time now goes into keeping that system accurate and reviewing what comes out of it.
Layouts, components and the design system itself.
Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign for the hand-made craft.
The brand written down, for people and AI agents.
Reads the system and builds with it.