Expand Your YOUNIVERSE —
Dell's most ambitious campaign of 2022.
A third-party agency brought the creative concept. Dell's internal engineering teams had to build it. I was the design lead in the middle — responsible for making sure what got built actually matched what was envisioned, across three phases, 12 months, and global markets.
The Problem
The gap between agency vision and enterprise reality is where campaigns go to die.
Dell commissioned an ambitious interactive campaign targeting 18–34 year olds globally. The agency delivered a compelling creative concept — immersive, personality-driven, designed to feel unlike anything Dell had done before. What they hadn't designed for was AEM, Dell's internal CMS, Dell's global marketing workflows, or the engineering team that would actually build it.
My job was to close that gap. Not to water down the concept, but to translate it — finding ways to preserve the intent of the experience while working inside the constraints neither the agency nor engineering could see from where they were standing.
How I Approached It
Build the system in Phase 1. Scale it in Phases 2 and 3.
Phase 1 wasn't just the campaign launch — it was the component system. Rather than designing each market's version independently, I built a reusable library in Phase 1 that regional teams could configure and adapt. This was a deliberate choice to invest more upfront in exchange for significantly less work — and much higher consistency — across every subsequent phase and market.
The Phase 1 component library. Each module designed to be configured by regional teams without individual design involvement per market.
Phases 2 and 3 expanded the experience and rolled out to new markets. Because the system was already in place, new market implementations were configuration problems, not design problems. The 28% improvement in component reuse was a direct result of Phase 1 investment.
New interactive features added in Phase 2, built on Phase 1 components. No re-architecture required.
Phase 3 implementations. What previously required full design engagement now required configuration.
Key Decisions
The most important decisions were about what not to design.
The translation gap between agencies and internal engineering is a design problem. It requires someone who can hold both realities at once — not someone who belongs entirely to either side.