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Great creative work starts long before anyone opens a design file. It starts with the right questions, genuine collaboration, and a strategic partner who understands your business.
For Designity Creative Director Caterina Toffoli, that's what creative leadership is all about.
With 15 years of experience across advertising, retail, e-commerce, and design leadership, Caterina knows how to turn creative challenges into opportunities.
We sat down with her to explore how she builds lasting client relationships, approaches creative strategy, and brings ambitious ideas to life.
Let’s get into it!
From Designing the Work to Shaping the Thinking
With 15 years of experience and a leadership style built on warmth, humor, and collaboration, Caterina brings a refreshingly human approach to creative direction.
1. Tell us about your background. How did you get to where you are as a Creative Director?
I've been a graphic designer for about 15 years now!
I started in advertising before moving into e-commerce and retail. I spent eight years as a senior designer at one of South Africa's most loved kitchen and homeware brands, which was where I really honed my craft.
From there, I became Head of Design at a large home services startup.
Over time, I naturally transitioned from being the person creating the work to the person shaping the thinking behind it.
That journey eventually brought me to Designity, where I've had the opportunity to lead a global creative team and work with a really diverse portfolio of clients across both strategy and execution.
2. How would you describe your creative leadership style?
If you've ever worked with me, you'll know I lead with humor!
I genuinely believe that if you're not having fun, what are you doing?
Humor and warmth help create a collaborative environment, whether I'm working with clients or leading our creative team.
I want people to feel comfortable sharing ideas, being open, and challenging each other.
Because really great work comes from good relationships.
And, of course, a healthy dose of good old South African humor never hurts!
3. What drew you to Designity's creative model?
I love how Designity challenges the traditional agency model and creates a more streamlined way for clients to access great creative talent.
What really appealed to me was the idea of having a dedicated Creative Director and Creative Project Manager overseeing the creative team.
Instead of clients having to coordinate with every individual creative, they have dedicated points of contact who understand their brand, manage the bigger picture, and help guide the work.
I also really enjoy being that person for clients and having the opportunity to build those relationships over time.
It's been quite different from anything I've experienced before, in a really positive way.
Beyond the Brief: Building Strategic Creative Partnerships
For Caterina, creative direction isn't about simply delivering what a client asks for. It's about understanding why they need it in the first place.
4. At what point in a project does the conversation shift from execution to strategy?
For me, strategy actually starts before execution.
A client might come to us saying they need a social media campaign or a redesigned corporate presentation.
But my first question is usually, "Why?"
What are we trying to achieve? Who are we speaking to? What do we want them to do?
Sometimes the original brief is exactly what they need. But often, asking those questions opens up an entirely different opportunity.|
That's where the value of having a Creative Director really comes in.
Of course, we want things to look beautiful, and the design details are important.
But we're always coming back to the bigger question: What problem are we actually trying to solve?
5. Have you ever challenged a brief or helped a client rethink their original objective?
I'm actually quite a pacifist, so I'm not someone who believes in pushing back just for the sake of it!
I don't think challenging a brief always has to mean saying no.
Clients know their brands incredibly well, and I never want them to feel like their opinions are being dismissed.
Instead, I prefer to open up the conversation.
Let's talk about what we're trying to achieve, who's going to see the work, and where it's going to live.
Once you understand those things, the original brief often evolves naturally.
For me, it's about collaboration rather than ego. We're working toward the same goal, and the best solution usually comes from figuring it out together.
6. What does a client relationship look like at month six compared to month one?
The biggest difference is trust.
When clients first come to us, they're handing over something incredibly personal. Their brand is their baby!
Naturally, there's a lot of checking in, discussing preferences, and making sure everyone feels comfortable.
But as we get to know their brand, understand how they think, and learn how they like to work, that relationship starts to change.
By month six, you might hear something like, "You know our brand. We trust you. Run with it."
And that's such a great place to be.
It means we've moved beyond being a creative supplier and become an extension of their team.
That's when the relationship becomes a genuine strategic partnership.
Bringing Strategy to Life: The PressReader Project
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One of Caterina's favorite Designity projects shows what happens when strong creative thinking, client trust, and careful execution come together.
The challenge?
Transforming a traditional event booth into an immersive brand experience for PressReader.
7. Tell us about the PressReader project. What was the brief, and what made it challenging?
PressReader is a media platform that gives users access to thousands of publications from around the world.
They attend events globally, and for an upcoming library industry event in Sydney, they wanted something a little different from their usual event branding.
The goal was to create an immersive booth that felt more like a cozy library environment than a traditional exhibition stand.
We wanted people to walk in, sit down on the comfortable sofas, and immediately feel calm and relaxed.
So we leaned into their existing color palette and created something dreamy, colorful, and inviting, without overwhelming the space with branding.
The biggest challenge was making sure that the concept would translate beautifully into a large-scale physical installation.
8. What was the first creative decision that shaped the direction of the project?
We started by exploring a few different visual directions, using AI as a conceptual tool.
PressReader already had these beautiful spectrum ribbons in its brand identity, so we decided to build on those colors and create a soft, almost dreamlike visual world.
The client loved the direction straight from the mood board!
That became our creative anchor for everything else, from the booth graphics to the additional printed assets.
We wanted the space to feel immersive rather than heavily branded, while still being unmistakably PressReader.
We also used AI to create a mockup showing how the different elements would come together, which really helped the client visualize the final experience.
9. Did anything not go according to plan? How did you handle it?
The biggest technical challenge was scaling the imagery for print.
It's one thing to create something beautiful on a screen. It's another to reproduce it across a massive trade show booth!
We were working with a combination of AI-generated imagery, raster graphics, and vector elements.
Our designer had to recreate parts of the artwork as vectors to make sure everything would remain sharp at such a large scale.
And because the event was in Australia, with the materials being printed in the US, we couldn't physically check the prints beforehand.
Coming from a traditional print design background, that was quite nerve-racking!
With digital work, you can always update a banner. But once a huge booth graphic is printed, there's no fixing a pixelated image on the day.
So we were incredibly meticulous about every detail.
Thankfully, our team shares that perfectionist streak, and the final result came out beautifully.
10. What are you most proud of about the project, beyond how it looked?
I'm most proud of how clearly the original idea came through in the final result.
Sometimes a project goes through so many rounds of revisions that you start losing the essence of what made the original concept special.
But with PressReader, we found the right direction early on.
The client loved the mood board, we had a clear vision, and we were able to carry that through to the finished experience.
When we finally received photos and videos of the physical booth, it looked just as beautiful as the mockup.
That was such a satisfying moment, especially being able to share the result with the creative team and see how all their hard work had paid off.
11. How did the client respond to the final result?
They were really happy with it!
What's especially lovely is that the project has come up several times since as an example of something that worked really well for them.
It's become a reference point for how we approach other creative projects together.
I think it helped us all see their brand a little differently and opened up new possibilities for future work.
For me, that's what makes it such a successful project. It wasn't only about delivering a beautiful booth. It helped move the creative relationship forward.
The Value of Having a Creative Director in Your Corner
After years of working inside marketing teams and leading creative projects, Caterina knows that the real value of a dedicated Creative Director often goes far beyond the final deliverables.
12. What's one thing marketing leaders don't realize about working with a dedicated Creative Director until they've experienced it?
I think people underestimate just how much mental load a dedicated Creative Director can take away.
Suddenly, you have this experienced person in your corner who understands your brand, knows your creative team, and is constantly thinking about quality, consistency, and the bigger picture.
You don't have to brief every tiny detail or handhold every project.
You have someone who cares about your brand as deeply as you do and is looking out for it.
And that frees you up to focus on everything else you need to do.
It's a really valuable relationship because you know there's someone else in the room thinking strategically about your brand.
"We have been working with Designity for a short time now and the biggest value of Designity is being able to work with a creative director to execute projects. The most exciting part about this collaboration is knowing that we are able to express our needs with the creative director to make our projects a reality."
13. What would you tell a marketing leader who's on the fence about working with a dedicated Creative Director?
Just do it!
But seriously, I've spent most of my career working in in-house design and marketing teams, and one thing I've learned is that everybody has an opinion about creative work.
The founder, the marketing team, the sales team, leadership. Everybody!
Before you know it, you've got a very noisy room, and it becomes difficult to figure out who's making the final creative decisions. Having a dedicated Creative Director helps cut through that noise.
We also bring an outside perspective. We're not sitting in every internal meeting, so we can look at your brand a little more objectively.
And because creative direction is our focus, we have the time to ask those important strategic questions.
Who is this for? What are we trying to achieve? Why are we making this decision?
I think that gives creative decisions a real center of gravity.
And having that clarity, support, and strategic thinking behind your brand is incredibly valuable.
Designity: Your Creative Team. Your Strategic Partner.
For Caterina, great creative leadership comes down to one thing:
The best work happens when people trust each other enough to think bigger together.
At Designity, we bring that philosophy to life through strategic creative partnerships.
As an AI-enabled, human-led Creative-as-a-Service platform, we provide a fully managed team led by a dedicated Creative Director, with access to the top 1% of global creatives and marketers.
Ready to turn creative support into a strategic partnership?
Book a demo and discover how Designity can become your long-term creative partner.
