aol.com

My role: Design System Lead

AOL was rebuilding its web experience for a July launch. I joined in March as Design System Lead, with two jobs: ship the redesigned site, and build the design system it would ship on.

The problem wasn't design quality. It was that design, PM, and engineering had no shared language, so every handoff started as a fresh negotiation.

So I scoped the system as an MVP, not a complete architecture — a primitive token layer first, semantic coverage where the launch demanded it, 150+ modules on top, everything else sequenced into a roadmap. That meant trading visual freedom for tokens engineering could enforce.

Component delivery went from over a week to two or three days. The system covered more than 80% of surfaces, and the site launched on time.

Verizon Retail had successful digital experiences and no shared toolkit to build them with. Kiosks, endcaps, tablets, and display walls were each designed against the Verizon Design System, but VDS was built for web — one viewport, one interaction model, a user sitting still. Retail is six hardware configurations from a 10-inch handheld to a 39.4-inch wall panel, under store lighting, with a customer standing next to a rep.

I created Verizon's first Retail Experience Design System: not a fork of VDS, but a retail layer governed on top of it.

Finding the actual problem

I ran 12 interviews with stakeholders and product owners across five partner organizations — RMA, CX, RX, VDS, and Brand Marketing — and audited the existing retail surfaces. That produced 48 findings, which resolved into eight areas: retail design strategy, accessibility-driven color, typography for large-format screens, an ergonomic UI system, digital-to-physical storytelling, hardware-specific specifications, retail tone of voice, and imagery.

The finding that shaped the architecture: teams weren't diverging because they disagreed. They diverged because VDS had no answer for a 39-inch screen, so each team invented one.

Sizing as a system dimension

Every component carries three size tiers mapped to hardware rather than breakpoints — XLarge for 10-inch screens, 2XLarge for 15-inch, 3XLarge for 12-inch and 39-inch panels — each with light and dark variants. A promo banner or checkbox resolves its own scale from the screen it lands on. Designers select the surface; the system resolves the value.

Typography was rebuilt on the same principle. A Feature/Title/Body scale in defined weights, tuned for viewing distances VDS never accounted for. Color was re-specified against store lighting: rules for red on white versus red on dark, because contrast that passes on a monitor fails on a backlit panel across a room.

The tradeoff

Retail teams gave up local styling freedom. In exchange, core system changes propagate instead of requiring a re-skin, and a component behaves the same on a handheld tablet and a wall display without being redrawn.

Applying it: the SMB brand refresh

When Verizon launched its brand refresh, the retail system was the first place it landed. I designed the Small and Medium Business product experience for in-store tablets — the flow a customer walks through mobile plans, internet plans, and business solutions.

Decisions that came from the environment rather than the brand:

Navigation anchored to the bottom edge. On a tablet held at counter height, the top of the screen is the hardest place to reach and the easiest to smudge.

Bilingual parity. The Español control sits in the same position on every screen, because language switching happens mid-conversation, not at session start.

QR as the handoff. The tablet is shared hardware. Anything the customer keeps has to leave the device without an email capture step.

Pricing configurators as components. Line-count steppers, AutoPay toggles, and tiered plan cards encode Verizon's business rules as reusable components with defined states, so promotional changes update through the system rather than through redesign.

The brand refresh shipped across the SMB experience without rebuilding the component layer.

Where it landed

Six months from kickoff to MVP, with design complete and implementation on Brand Central following. Deployed across Verizon retail digital touchpoints nationwide, with guidelines and the Figma component library on a three-month update cadence.

Carta Design System — Ink

Carta was rebranding, and the constraint wasn't visual. The existing system had no semantic layer to rebrand against — color was applied straight from a palette, so changing the brand meant touching every surface that used it.

I architected Ink's color system in four tiers: primitives (the raw scale), foundation (brand accents and status colors), core (backgrounds, content, lines), and product semantics. The tier that does the work is foundation. It sits between the raw palette and everything downstream, so changing it re-resolves core and product semantics against a new brand without a single component changing.

The product semantics tier is where the domain lives. On an equity platform, status_Tier 1 through 7 encode where a security sits in its lifecycle, and info_Positive / info_Attention carry financial meaning rather than decoration. Getting those names wrong isn't a style problem.

Typography
Role-based, not size-based. Display, heading, paragraph, and legal tiers — each with documented usage rules and link/hover variants. Designers choose the role; the scale resolves the value. That distinction is what keeps a type system stable when the brand moves.

Accessibility
I validated the brand palette under monochromacy, tritanopia, and deuteranopia before locking it. On a product where color signals financial state, a palette that collapses under color blindness is a functional failure, not a cosmetic one.

Sequencing
Nine months, no delivery freeze. I phased the migration deliberately: color semantics first, then type and iconography, then grid and spacing, then page patterns. Color, type, the navigation system, and the redesigned UI shipped during my time on the team. The later phases were sequenced and documented for the teams continuing the rollout.

IBM Works 2017–2019

During this time, I collaborated with various teams on IBM’s business web and mobile products. My responsibilities included developing design solutions, creating a new visual system for a new product, designing components for their CMS system, and revamping existing applications. In order to successfully execute these projects, I needed to have a deep understanding of their new brand system, keep up with ongoing updates, and educate different teams on the right design solutions to align with the new design system.

What I did:

• Senior Designer

• IBM Watson: web visual design system setup

• Application product design

• Digital design directions / UI / web CMS prototype design

• IBM new brand digital design explorations—through web experience, applications, and editorial.

Teams I worked with:

• Brand Center NY

• Design Language

• IBV App

• IBM Watson

• IBM Partners

Project description is included in the screenshot thread.

Courvoisier Website Redesign

courvoisier.com

Overview:
Courvoisier is a brand of cognac owned by Beam Suntory, a subsidiary of Suntory Holdings.

I collaborated with the Havas CX team to meet the client's redesign request for Courvoisier's website. The objective was to establish Courvoisier as a global symbol of luxury and communicate the brand's new world to consumers. This involved refining the content hierarchy and creating page templates using the new global design system and components. My focus was on crafting an effective user experience that delivers the core brand story to users.

My Role:

• Design Lead partnered with account director/ strategy director

• Worked & communicated directly with Courvoisier stakeholders

• Cocktail art direction collaborated with a photographer / CD, photo, and a photo retoucher

• Design process management from concept to final deliverable

• Webpage design / Prototype creation

• Image asset art direction/management collaborating with art buyers

• Design presentation

As part of the Havas creative team appointed by IBM Watson, our mission was to elevate viewer engagement and extend the Grammy's footprint. We achieved this by leveraging IBM Watson to reveal hidden connections between Grammy-nominated artists. Using Watson's analysis of more than 14 million articles and bios on 19,000 Grammy-nominated artists, we discovered interesting and surprising connections.

Our ultimate goal was to help increase fan engagement, which The Recording Academy had been looking to improve in recent years through the use of an IBM Watson-powered solution.

My Role:

• Senior Product Designer

• Collaboration with creative director/UX/content strategists

• User Experience Journey Design / Research

• Product Design:
  - Overall page XD iterations
  - Satellite Module Iterations
  - Personalization Components
  - Onboarding Page Modules
  - UI

• Usability Testing