Kate Wilson · Brand designer · Dallas

Identity work for
businesses that have
to sell something.

Wordmarks, packaging and design systems for companies where the design has a job: get on the shelf, get through a permit review, ship on Thursday. Nine years, mostly food, healthcare and fintech.

See the work Available from January

Ridgeback Coffee Roasters

Wordmark, packaging system, retail rollout

2025

A bag that survives being three inches wide on a shelf

The old bag was a photograph of beans with a script logo across it. At shelf distance it read as brown. Buyers at two grocery chains had passed on it, and both said the same thing: it looks like every other small roaster.

The new system is a flat wordmark, one strong field of color per origin, and the roast level set larger than the brand name. The point is not minimalism. The point is that a shopper five feet away can tell light from dark without reading anything.

Before Ridgeback coffee roasters est. 2014
After RIDGEBACK DARK
  • 12 stores added in the first quarter after relaunch
  • Two chains that had previously passed, both listed it
  • 4 origins on one system, printed from a single die
On shelf, H-E-B Austin
Four origins together

Cardinal Dental Group

Identity, signage standards, six locations

2024

One identity, six buildings, six different sign codes

Each practice had been branded by whoever built it, so patients could not tell the group apart from six unrelated dentists. The constraint was not aesthetic. Three of the buildings sat in municipalities with hard limits on illuminated signage and letter height.

I designed the mark to work at two proportions, one wide and one stacked, and wrote a signage standard that fabricators could quote from without calling me. The stacked version exists because of a 32-inch height cap in Plano.

Deep#123B5B
Signal#2E7DA6
Paper#F3F1EA
Alert#C8452F
  • 22% lower sign fabrication cost against the first quote
  • Zero permit rejections across six municipalities
  • One PDF the fabricators worked from, start to finish

.Ledger

Design system, 41 components, handoff process

2023

The design system existed to stop the arguing

Four designers, nine engineers, and eleven different shades of the same blue in production. Every sprint ended with a debate about spacing that nobody had authority to settle.

The system is small on purpose: eight spacing steps, one type scale, four semantic colors, and a rule that a new component needs two existing uses before it gets built. Most of my work was deleting proposals, not drawing them.

Type scale, 1.25 ratio

Display 39

Heading 31

Subhead 25

Lead 20

Body 16

Caption 13

  • 41 components, down from 96 proposed
  • Handoff from three days to half a day, measured over a quarter
  • Still in use two years later, with two designers who never met me

Process

Six weeks of the Ridgeback rebrand in four minutes

Sketches, the two routes that did not survive the buyer meeting, the press check, and the first morning it sat on a shelf. Most of design is the discarded work, so this shows it.

Video, 4 min 06 sec

How I work

The constraint is the brief

Shelf distance, sign codes, print budget, a developer who has to build it. I ask for those before I ask what you like, because they decide more than taste does.

Three routes, then one

I show three directions once, with the reasoning, and then we commit. Endless rounds of options are how projects die, and how designers hide from a decision.

Files anyone can use

Every project ends with production files, a short standard, and the fonts licensed correctly. If you need me to explain it on a call, I have not finished it.

Where I have been

  1. 2021 – now
    Independent, Dallas Brand and packaging for food, healthcare and fintech clients.
  2. 2018 – 2021
    Senior Designer, Pitchfork Studio Identity and packaging, consumer goods.
  3. 2016 – 2018
    Designer, Halbrook Agency Retail campaigns and print production.
  4. 2016
    BFA Communication Design, University of North Texas

Taking projects from January.

Identity, packaging, and design systems. Tell me what the design has to accomplish and what it cannot cost, and I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person for it.

kate@katewilson.design Resume, PDF

Last updated 16 September 2026

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