DeepL - Social Media Template System

DeepL's Creative Studio produces social content across multiple channels, formats, and content franchises, for EU, US, and APAC markets. Templates existed, but they were not working as a system.

One base template allows the team to create lots of variations

My role

Designer and owner of DeepL's social media template library. Built the components and wrote the documentation.

Team

Art Director: Ana Rodrigues

One library, very different users

Assets were inconsistent across platforms and formats, and there was no reliable way to find the latest version of anything. Every new post started with a search through individual files, and often ended in a rebuild.

That meant designers were spending their time on technical decisions instead of creative ones. Spacing, font sizes, and component structure were being solved from scratch on every asset, by people who had already solved them a dozen times.

The library had to serve experienced in-house designers who need flexibility, and external agencies and freelancers who need constraints. Too rigid and it gets abandoned. Too open and it stops protecting the brand.

The carousel post uses two templates

Template for framed photos posts, instead of full bleed

Designers were spending their time on technical decisions instead of creative ones

Focus on the creativity

The design goal was to remove every technical decision from the process. A designer picks a template and focuses entirely on the creative work. Spacing, font sizes, and component structure are already handled. No technical decisions, no brand guesswork.

Each template is a Figma component with a property panel, so labels, logos, CTAs, and copy fields toggle on and off without breaking the layout. Emoji cues in the property names make the panel readable at a glance, and every component links to its own documentation.

I wrote the full documentation to match: how to enable the libraries, drag and drop usage, export settings per platform, and overall best practices covering logo usage, labels, CTAs, font sizes, colour pairings, and rules for isometric illustrations in social formats. The system assumes the person using it will not have access to me.

Outcome and impact

The library became the shared source for social media production. External agencies and freelancers working for DeepL now use it, which has directly reduced visual inconsistencies across third party output.