What's a Hao
I do two things. I make brand work that's genuinely good. And I build the systems so the team keeps making it good without me in the room. Most places I've worked, the two didn't go together. That's the gap I sit in.
Studio
I started in a boutique studio. Hand-drawn brand identities, illustration, menus, signage, large-format print. For Tokyo Sushi Kitchen I built a whole identity in a manga style and put it on the walls of their venues. This is where I learned to make things by hand and make them production-ready.
Then M&C Saatchi as a designer, across CPA Australia, Cricket Australia and Bank Australia. After that, years freelancing at top agencies: TBWA, Thinkerbell and Town Square working on brands like Nissan, Coles, Dan Murphy's, ANZ and Medibank. The agencies trusted me with the work and kept calling me back. No one batted an eyelid at Thinkerbell when I spent an hour setting up a spreadsheet to ship 200+ location-specific OOH for 13cabs off an InDesign source-of-truth I built to be error-proof. That's the instinct my career runs on.
Corporate
Now I'm at an ASX-listed financial services company as Senior Manager, Digital Design. I was recruited to bring brand and marketing design in-house, ran a full brand refresh end to end, and built a self-serve system that lets the team ship compliant, on-brand campaigns without a designer in the loop.
The highest-leverage thing I do doesn't photograph. I take the decisions a designer makes by hand, layout, compliance, what's approved, and I bake them into the system once, so they stop getting re-litigated every campaign. Anyone on the team can then produce work that's on-brand and compliant on their own. The team gets its time back. The craft doesn't go anywhere — it's the reason the system is worth trusting.