Mobile & Communities GTM — Cardinal

Art Director — Campaign Design & ICP Infrastructure

The UI was telling the wrong story to the wrong audience.

Thinkific's Mobile & Communities campaign was a Tier 1 product launch — the biggest category of release — covering a full redesign of the mobile learner experience and a new communities product, targeting ~16,600 in-app customers across four segments. I designed the full suite of campaign assets: Userpilot modal flows and micro-animations, email templates, social graphics, brochure PDF, app store screenshots, and empty state pages. The scope was large partly by necessity — because every asset in this campaign featured product UI, and I noticed a problem with that UI as soon as work began.

The gap

I noticed it while working through the first campaign assets. The existing ICP profile — a sustainability business — wasn't a credible fit for who Thinkific actually sells to. The UI mockups running through the entire product design system showed botanical imagery, consumer-facing course content, nothing that reflected the academies, training businesses, and enterprise learning teams Thinkific is actually selling to. Nobody questions a placeholder until someone looks at it through a campaign lens — and that's exactly what happened here. Rather than flag it as a blocker, I took ownership of the fix. Given the tight project timeline, I leveraged AI to rapidly build a replacement ICP from scratch: Cardinal, a healthcare training business, complete with a full brand identity, visual guidelines, and a foundational image bank. I also built a second ICP for our Academy audience, Mericodian, as a temporary stop gap while Cardinal was rolled out by the product design team. The work took under two weeks.

The cross-functional fix

I engaged the right people across the organisation to action the fix on the product design team. The collaboration was the critical piece — bringing them the full Cardinal brand guidelines and ICP profile meant they could systematically update the UI mockups across their design system so that every team pulling product UI would have Cardinal by default going forward. The scope of the fix went beyond this campaign. Cardinal is now the foundational default ICP used across all net-new marketing assets at Thinkific. The longer-term vision is a library of ICP profiles the team can pull from depending on audience — Cardinal is the foundation that makes that scalable.

What was designed

— Userpilot modal flows and micro-animations for 4 customer segments — Email templates for two campaign phases across segmented audiences — Social graphics (LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, X) — Branded Mobile brochure PDF — App store screenshot sequences for iOS and Android — Empty state pages for the Branded Mobile in-app experience All of it featured Cardinal UI, built on the design system update initiated with the product team.

The result

The campaign launched April 22, 2026. We refocused creative assets and product UI marketing on an updated ICP, making every campaign asset more credible and relevant to the core buyer. — 4.5× increase in mobile package sales over launch benchmarks. — +60% YoY sales growth (seasonality-controlled). — 84% of self-serve buyers engaged with email or in-app flows before converting. — 24.1% in-app slideout completion rate