Case Study:
Alltech BeefDay
Company
Alltech is a multinational company that delivers smarter and more sustainable solutions for agriculture. Its portfolio of products and services improves animal and plant performance, contributing to better nutrition and reduced environmental impact.
My role: Full-time Graphic Designer
I work with a Latin American marketing team, developing marketing materials for multiple countries. My responsibility is to translate global brand standards into regionally relevant visual communication, while maintaining strict consistency with Alltech’s brand guidelines.
The Project
The Challenges
The project faced multiple constraints simultaneously:
- A last-minute strategic change: shortly before production, new internal research data highlighted strong results for another product, leading leadership to shift the event’s focus.
- An extremely tight deadline: all materials needed to be redesigned, approved, and sent to print within a single day.
- Regulatory limitations: the data was not yet public, which legally prevented us from making any written claims about product effectiveness.
- Asset limitations: the existing visual assets were generic and failed to clearly represent the specific stress scenario relevant to the Brazilian market.
These factors led to a central design challenge:
How could we communicate animal stress during transportation
— and the relevance of the product — without making any written claims,
while still addressing a highly specific regional context?
Design Approach
Given the regulatory constraints, I proposed a visual-first communication strategy, relying on imagery rather than text to convey the message.
Transportation is a recognized moment of stress in livestock management. Instead of describing this verbally, the idea was to visually depict the exact moment when stress occurs, allowing the audience to immediately understand the context without violating compliance rules.
Execution
Icon-set
During the asset review, I also identified a regional mismatch: the existing cattle icons followed a global standard based on Angus cattle, which represent a minority in Brazil.
To address this, I designed a new set of Nelore cattle icons, the predominant breed in Brazil, strictly following Alltech’s global iconography guidelines.
This ensured regional accuracy while preserving brand consistency.
Imagery
Stock photography proved insufficient, as most available images were too generic and did not reflect the Brazilian reality of livestock transportation.
After targeted research, we identified a photographer with authentic images of Brazilian cattle being loaded into transport trucks.
I led the image selection and we negotiated usage rights to ensure the photograph could be applied legally and consistently across all materials.
Booth Design
All designs were developed within Alltech’s established brand system. While colors, templates, and base typography were predefined, I focused on:
- Positioning all key communication at eye level to ensure immediate visibility and clarity, while preventing booth furniture from obstructing essential elements
- Typography hierarchy and weight to guide attention
- Alltech leaf positioned to guide the eye to the photograph
- Image scale and positioning to make the photograph the primary storytelling element
System Extension: Flyers & Supporting Materials
The booth’s visual system was later extended to three flyers for complementary products.
Rather than treating these as isolated materials, I applied the same layout logic, grid structure, typography hierarchy, and visual language used in the booth. This created a cohesive system in which the booth and printed materials reinforced each other.
The Nelore icon set was also incorporated into these materials, further strengthening regional relevance and visual clarity.
Outcome & Impact
- The final booth successfully communicated the product’s relevance during transportation stress without making any written claims.
- The visual-first approach enabled fast approval from regulatory, marketing, and sales teams within an extremely compressed timeline.
- The redesigned Nelore icons improved regional accuracy and audience identification while remaining fully aligned with global brand standards.
- All materials were delivered to print on time, avoiding delays or last-minute compromises for the event.
Key Takeaways
- Visuals can replace language when language is restricted.
This project reinforced that design is not decoration, it is communication. Regional accuracy is not a detail — it’s strategy.
Using Brazilian transportation imagery and Nelore-based iconography created immediate regional identification and brought the audience closer to the message.