Applying atomic design theory to InDesign and print documents
Overview
In 2021 I joined Oracle’s CX and Advertising pillar as the Brand Designer supporting their global sales teams. The company had just introduced a new identity called Redwood, a system backed by a detailed style guide and built for product teams working in Figma. It was designed for web, mobile, and software experiences, not for the long form sales materials my partners relied on every day. When I joined, all of the sales collateral on this team was bright red, off brand, and out of date. It all needed a rehaul so that's why I was hired.
These teams lived in e-books, infographics, and multi page narratives. This was very much a B2B space so their work needed to be fast to understand and unmistakably on brand. Everything also needed to be built in InDesign rather than Figma for optimal PDF functionality. My job was to carry the intent of Redwood into a completely different medium and make it feel natural.
Example of Oracle's B2B sales materials up until 2021
Goal
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Master the Redwood brand guidelines and Design System
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Build out a library of assets, copy/paragraph style, and templates for InDesign converted over from the Design System built in Figma
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Reskin all of Oracle's sales enablement assets with this new Redwood branding
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Take net-new assets created in InDesign and convert them back into atoms/molecules in the Redwood Design System in Figma
My Role
The fastest way to understand Redwood was to start working with it. After onboarding, I spent time absorbing the style guide and studying how the system functioned inside product teams. Although it was created for digital interfaces, the principles still applied. Atomic Design gave me a structure I could use to organize and scale the work. The e-books and infographics often shared similar formats, which made it natural to see each section as an organism or molecule with the original atoms from Figma filling in the details.
My first assignment was to rebuild Oracle's flagship Spark and Ignite guides, a pair of sales e-books that had been created under the previous brand. They needed a complete redesign. I exported every usable atom from Figma as SVGs and created a documented asset library inside InDesign. With that in place, I started building early wireframes that mapped out the structure of the new guides.
These wireframes were intentionally rough. I wanted the team to focus on the flow and hierarchy of the content rather than the polish. Redwood has a more expressive and fluid character, and the low fidelity approach made it easier to align on the idea before I committed to execution.
I broke down the current sales collateral into core UX wireframes for scaling content from multiple sources
Once I walked my manager through the library and wireframes, I got the green light to move ahead. The brand shipped with a small set of backgrounds and graphic elements, so I stretched that as far as I could. I knew we needed more depth, so I partnered with our illustrator to expand the visual toolkit. The library grew to nearly three times its original size, which opened the door for work that felt richer and more connected to Redwood.
Artifacts within the Redwood Design System
Applying Redwoods to the wireframes
With the first guide complete, I moved to the next assignment. This version lived inside our mobile app. The workflow remained the same. The atoms came from the same system, but the content required new molecules and updated wireframes. Most of the foundational thinking had been solved during the first round, so this pass was focused on shaping the story for mobile and refining the layouts to support a smaller viewing context.
Mobile wireframes > Branded wireframes
From mobile wireframes to branded content
Outcome
In a matter of weeks I was able to translate a digital first design system into a version that worked inside InDesign and supported long form, content heavy materials. The system aligned to the intent of Redwood and gave sales teams work that felt clearer and more aligned to the brand. Although I left before performance metrics were shared, I ramped quickly, delivered consistently, and built a framework that saved future designers significant time while improving the overall quality of the materials. The work and many of the components are still in use today, with examples visible on oracle.com/cx.