love, tindel

Design and creative leader, Atlanta

Set the bar. Build the system. Jump in.

Design leadership for companies in the middle of a big change: a new brand, a rebuilt website, a new way of working. Twenty-three years, every seat from designer to head of creative.

See the work

John Tindel

When a company changes, a dozen workstreams have to agree. The work is getting them to agree.

The short version. Corpay and Thryv. One rebrand, two product shifts, one full website rebuild, and the teams and systems that made the work repeatable.

The work.

Each one told the same way: the change, the seat, what moved, the proof. The Corpay cases open with a password sent to interviewers.

01 Corpay 2024 to now

SeatHead of Creative Services, then Sr. Director, Creative and Web UX/UI

New brand. New website. New way to make the work.

  • Weeks→a day

    Briefs, page designs and working prototypes.

  • Promoted

    From running in-house creative to leading the website rebuild, in 2025.

  • One standard

    Design, development and brand on one design system, connected to Figma.

First, in-house creative: the new brand, rolled out across every channel. Then the thing every buyer meets first: the website, and the studio that builds it.

Shared in interviews. The full story of both roles opens with the same password.

The rebuilt corpay.com homepage
02 AI Studio 2026, in pilot

SeatMulti-agent system design

A creative department built from four AI agents.

  • 4 agents

    Copy Chief, Creative Director, Media Wonk and an Accomplice who breaks the pattern.

  • 52 spec files

    About 100,000 words of brand canon, roles and rules the agents work from.

  • 43 changes

    Human-approved improvements in the first four days of the pilot.

They write, argue and check each other's work. A person still signs every release.

One sentence in, a room of specialists out. The job is sized first, so a headline never gets the full pipeline. Every claim has to trace to a source, every check is labeled automated or by hand, and the system never approves its own work.

  • Multi-agent orchestration
  • Agentic workflows
  • Human-in-the-loop approval
  • AI governance
  • Audit trail
  • Context engineering
  • Deterministic guardrails
  • Source-grounded claims
  • Synthetic persona evals
  • Prompt-injection defense
  • Model-agnostic: Claude and ChatGPT
  • Human-approved learning

A full campaign, start to finish

  1. 01Route
  2. 02Strategy lock
  3. 03Territories
  4. 04Make
  5. 05Production list
  6. 06Gate and truth check
  7. 07Panel verdict
  8. 08Synthetic jury
  9. 09Human sign-off
Unlock the case

The architecture, the agents and a live run. Password sent to interviewers.

03 Thryv 2020 to 2024

SeatManager, Digital Design, then Head of Creative

Thryv changed what it sold. Twice. The website changed with it.

  • <1%→10%+

    Website conversion.

  • 2×

    Web sales, doubled in 2023.

  • +35%

    Booked sales appointments from the guided demo.

A site rebuild is never one deliverable. It's a dozen workstreams that have to agree, across brand, product marketing, sales and development.

The job was to keep every piece telling the same story and to make the call when they pulled apart. Testing shaped those calls, and the design team grew through outside hires and internal promotions without losing anyone.

Read the case
Thryv Business Center page on desktop and the homepage on a phone, both from the rebuild
04 Social ads Thryv, 2020 to 2024

SeatManager, Digital Design, then Head of Creative

Social that sells software to small businesses.

Carousels that open on the owner's question, survey data turned into shareable charts, and ThryvPay ads that show the product doing the work.

All in the same system as the site, so the ad and the page it led to felt like one experience. The work grew leads, organic traffic and followers.

See the ads
Thryv carousel ad, card 1: Want to show up on Google?
Thryv carousel ad, card 2
Thryv carousel ad, card 3
05 Pricing Thryv, 2023

SeatManager, Digital Design, then Head of Creative

The tidy pricing page tested badly. So it was rebuilt.

The first version put each product behind a tab. People didn't want to hunt through tabs for a price, and the products in the other tabs went unseen.

After a two-month trial, a single page with a sticky menu kept the whole lineup in view, each product in its own color. Engagement went up, and visitors started moving between products.

Read the case
The old Thryv pricing page, with each product behind a tab
Before: tabs
The new Thryv pricing page, with a sticky menu showing the full lineup
After: a sticky menu
06 YP 2014 to 2020

SeatSenior designer on the in-house team

A national brand, reintroduced coast to coast.

  • +400%

    Email click-through after the redesign.

  • Grand Central

    A full station takeover during Advertising Week 2014.

  • 1st

    YP's first national commercial, part of YP Can Do That.

A rebrand across web and print, and YP Can Do That, from Grand Central to billboards in LA.

Also the main sales website, redesigned around its three product lines, and the Make Every Day Local campaign site. The lesson: what it takes to make one idea hold up at full size.

Read the case
YP logo across the steps at Grand Central Terminal
The stairs
Wall ad: Can the YP app help you get to the moon?
"Get to the moon?"
Wall ad of a city built from everyday searches
A city of searches
YP ads lining a subway platform
The platforms
07 Lead tool YP, 2014 to 2020

SeatSenior designer on the in-house team

A visitor becomes a lead in two inputs.

An owner picks an industry and enters a zip code. The site maps the local searches the business is missing without digital marketing.

Designed with YP's data team for the homepage of the sales website. The gap on the map becomes a lead for sales.

Read the case
The YP sales homepage tool: Let us show you what your business is missing
Pick an industry, enter a zip code
The result: local searches mapped for the business
The result: local searches, mapped

The approach.

Three principles, and the work behind each one.

01Set the bar.

A team does its best work when it knows what good looks like and who makes the call. Set the direction, make the call when the pieces pull apart, and grow the people who clear the bar.

  • ThryvGrew the design team through outside hires and internal promotions, with zero turnover.
  • CorpayRan the in-house team that turned a new identity into a working system.
  • AtlantaMentor at The Creative Project.

02Build the system.

A big change sticks when the right decision is the easy one. Standards, libraries and workflows let a team deliver the same quality every time.

  • CorpayOne web standard and design system across design, development and brand, connected to Figma.
  • CorpayAn AI workflow from request to developer-ready handoff, now used across the creative and brand teams.
  • ThryvA living style guide, icon libraries and a landing page system for the new brand.

03Jump in.

Designer, art director, UX strategist, boss: every seat, so the work can still be picked up. It keeps judgment honest and gets decisions made faster.

  • CorpayNew concepts go from spec to clickable prototype in a day, so executives decide on a real experience instead of slides.
  • ThryvThe tidy pricing page tested badly, so we rebuilt it.
  • AtlantaStill painting walls.

Imagination Bureau. Eighteen years.

An independent shop, with work for IBM, Coca-Cola, Heineken, Jack Daniel's, Universal Studios and the City of Atlanta. Everything else lives here: marks, merch, packaging and a few ads.

A gold ATL lightning-bolt pin on a denim collar, from the ATL Collection launch

AI work, now

AI that works like a good studio.

Story Engine hands one story to a crew of agents and gets back an article, posts, a two-week campaign and the briefs. The ATL Collection launched an art brand from a single brief.

Ask for the demo

Murals across Atlanta.

Murals for State Farm Arena, Google Fiber, NCR, Hilton, Puttshack and the old CNN Center. Named one of Atlanta's 50 Most Creative People.

See the studio
Mural inside State Farm Arena
State Farm Arena
The Machine mural at NCR headquarters
NCR, "The Machine"
Mural for Google Fiber
Google Fiber
Long mural wall at Hilton
Hilton
Mural at the former CNN Center
The former CNN Center
Mural at Puttshack
Puttshack
A wide ATL mural wall
ATL