I turned a real client problem into a B2B design tool
I’m a designer, and I recently launched a free beta of a product called Rectiva.
The idea came from a problem I encountered while working at a design agency.
One of our clients was a global brand with local marketing teams across four countries in Asia. HQ already had detailed brand guidelines and even tracked compliance through KPI reports, but the content produced across local markets was still inconsistent.
They came to us asking how they could make brand execution more consistent across regions.
My first attempt was to make the guidelines easier to apply in production. I designed Figma templates covering different channels and sizes for the local teams to use.
But the consistency problem was still there.
That made me wonder whether one part of the problem was that, even with guidelines and templates, many brand rules still depended on whoever was creating the content to interpret and apply them correctly.
I later asked people in r/DesignSystems why this happens across global teams. The answers were varied — local market needs, weak enforcement, rigid guidelines, ownership, training, and creative freedom all came up.
So I stopped thinking of it as a single-cause problem.
Instead, I decided to focus on one part I could actually build for: reducing how much brand compliance depends on someone remembering and manually interpreting the guidelines while creating content.
That became Rectiva.
Rectiva is a web-based design editor. Structural rules can be built directly into templates, while things that require visual judgment can be reviewed against plain-language rules defined by the brand admin.
For example, a brand can define rules such as “the product must not be cut off at the frame edge,” or check whether a logo has enough contrast against its background.
The product is working now, but I’m still very early. Finding the right users has been harder than I expected, and before I spend too much time thinking about distribution, I’d really like some honest feedback on the product itself.
If you try the demo, I’m especially curious about three things:
- Is it immediately clear what problem Rectiva is solving?
- Does the way I’m solving it make sense, or does anything feel unnecessary or overcomplicated?
- Is there any point in the demo where you lose interest, hesitate, or wonder why you would need this?
Feedback on the positioning or where you’d look for early users would also be really useful, but product feedback is what I’d value most right now.
No-signup demo:
https://rectiva.io/demo
Free beta:
https://rectiva.io
Anyway, here’s to finding my first customer..
The interesting part is that templates didn’t solve the consistency problem because they still left interpretation with the person creating the asset. That seems like the harder problem to solve, especially when local teams need some freedom rather than rigid templates.
The part about reducing reliance on people remembering and manually interpreting guidelines really stood out to me. It feels like you’re solving the gap between “the rules exist” and “the rules actually get followed in production.” Curious to see how this holds up when teams have rules that require more subjective judgment.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment! Rules that require subjective judgment are definitely the harder part.
For now, I’m focusing on brand consistency and trying to keep the review criteria as concrete and observable as possible. Since brand admins can define the AI review rules in plain language, they can also make the criteria more specific when a rule needs more context, which gives the review a clearer basis for making a judgment.
Of course, there’s still a limit to how reliably something highly subjective can be evaluated, so figuring out where that boundary should be is something I’m still exploring.