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.
My role
Brand system designer. I built and documented DeepL's social media template library in Figma, and later migrated it into Figma Buzz.
The project
Replace a set of loose files with a component-based template library covering every format DeepL's channels use. Two problems recurred: social assets were inconsistent across platforms and formats, and there was no reliable way to find the latest version of anything.
The solution
The team was already striving for quality. The problem was where they started. Each new post began from the last social file someone had used, so designers rebuilt the header from scratch every time, and the logo ended up at three different sizes. The structure drifted, and the output stopped saying "this is a post from DeepL." The framing I gave the team was that the templates are not fixed constraints. They are an empty DeepL-branded canvas, where you can be creative without worrying about the technicalities behind it.
Every template carries a copy limit: 100 characters for a header, 260 for carousel body content. I arrived at those by testing title and description lengths across languages, not just English, so copy would still fit when the same post ran in a market where the translation runs long. For a translation company, a template that only works in English is not a template.
The library covers every ratio the channels use, and the base component's property panel is identical across all of them, so learning it once is enough. Content franchises are built in as a dropdown rather than free text, because a typed label can be misspelled, restyled, or invented, while a dropdown keeps the category system intact. The families are built around real jobs: base posts and carousel covers, carousel interiors, framed photo for when a full-bleed image is not an option, webinar layouts with speakers and event details, and quotes.
I also wrote the full documentation with the marketing and content team, covering usage, export, and the franchise breakdown, and linked it directly from each component's property panel so help sits where the work happens rather than in a file nobody opens.
Results
The library became the Creative Studio's default starting point for social, replacing the copy-the-last-file habit and giving DeepL's channels a consistent structural identity across formats and markets. Adoption grew past the design team as content designers began producing their own posts from it. When Figma Buzz launched, I moved the templates across, which opened post creation to colleagues in marketing who had never worked in Figma, turning a designer tool into something the wider team could use.
