What began as a video editing role evolved, over nearly a decade, into something much closer to creative direction. Across three brand eras and hundreds of videos, I grew from executing a pre-existing visual style into owning the entire creative system — driving brand decisions, shaping instructional strategy, building production infrastructure, and collaborating directly with marketing leadership. Hootsuite Academy became the project that defined my career trajectory, and the work speaks to what’s possible when a single creative is trusted to grow with a platform rather than just serve it.
When I joined Hootsuite in 2016, Academy’s video library was functional but visually flat — adequate for delivering information, but not designed to guide a learner through it. I started pushing the style toward something more engaging and instructionally intentional: animation that moved with the content, pacing that let concepts breathe, and a visual flow that walked viewers through ideas rather than just presenting them. The goal was video that actually taught, not just talked.
As the approach matured, I built a master After Effects template to support it — a modular production system that standardized the visual language across the library and dramatically cut turnaround time. What once took a week and a half per video could now be turned around twice in a week. The catalogue expanded alongside it, growing to more than eight courses and hundreds of individual videos covering strategic pillars like Social Selling and Social Marketing.
When Hootsuite introduced its brand refresh in 2019 — warmer colours, a bolder visual identity — I adapted Academy’s entire video system to match. This era was the most ambitious in scope, expanding course depth and breadth across the library. It was also when my role quietly shifted: I moved from adapting the brand to helping shape it, working directly with the marketing team and contributing Academy assets back into the broader Hootsuite brand system.
It was also when my role quietly shifted. Working directly alongside the marketing team during the refresh, I moved from adapting the brand to actively contributing to it — developing assets and visual approaches that fed back into the broader Hootsuite brand system rather than just drawing from it. Academy had grown large enough, and visible enough, that its creative output had weight beyond its own channel. That shift in dynamic changed how I thought about the work, and set the tone for everything that followed.
The 2022 rebrand was Hootsuite’s most dramatic shift — bright red, a redesigned Owly mascot, a bold new visual system. Rather than just reskinning what we had, we used it as a forcing function to audit and streamline the entire library: cutting bloated content, sharpening focus, and reorienting the courseware toward a more socially sophisticated, enterprise-ready audience. The template by this point was a near-automated production machine — capable of delivering polished, on-brand video in days, not weeks.
My involvement in this rebrand went well beyond video. I was embedded in the creative process from early on, working with the brand and marketing teams to help define how the new identity would translate across Academy’s full range of assets — not just motion, but visual systems, design language, and the overall look and feel of the learning experience. In many ways this era reflected the full arc of the role: what started as video production had grown into genuine creative leadership, with my work feeding directly into how one of Canada’s most recognized tech brands presented itself to the world.
View the channel: hootsuite.com/academy
