SWG Leadership

Stephanie Wood Group, known as SWG, is an executive coaching and leadership development firm based in Indianapolis. They came looking for graphic design support on client-facing deliverables. SWG is the only non-church client written up as a formal case study. They found their way here through church work, but the deliverables were entirely corporate.

The work

Three deliverables anchored the engagement: a playbook for one of SWG's clients, HMH Leadership, plus two SWG-branded sales documents, a proposal and a capabilities booklet.

The HMH Leadership playbook was the most complex of the three. It needed to communicate mission, vision, values and cultural characteristics, a strategic plan with four pillars, guiding principles, and a leadership brand piece still being developed mid-project. The purpose of the document, as the brief described it, was to "simply and visually communicate the reason for each piece of work as well as the connections of the pieces." An old SWG workbook InDesign file provided the color, icon, and typography vocabulary from the start.

The work iterated through mission and vision pages, a strategic pillars layout, a cultural characteristics treatment weaving together values and behaviors, and a leadership brand section that landed after an internal workshop. Content drops came in as each section was finalized.

In parallel, the SWG proposal document and the SWG capabilities booklet were built as sales-facing pieces. Both had to read polished and trustworthy. The capabilities booklet went through a proper editorial pass with client logos, four-pillar examples, screenshots, and corrections incorporated. By midsummer the HMH Leadership Brand and Playbook was also receiving revision rounds as new content arrived.

The Illustrator files for the coaching and leadership development pieces were handed over fully layered and labeled so the team could work from clean, organized source. That kind of request is a good sign. It means the work is living inside the client's broader system and getting reused across their leadership programs.

SWG and I work hourly, which suits the project-specific nature of these deliverables. Across the HMH Leadership playbook, the SWG proposal document, and the SWG capabilities booklet, this is a complete body of corporate design work that holds up against any agency comparison.