2018-PRESENT
Our editorial staff was frustrated with their sites. The homepage and feed layouts were rigid, static templates: a header area followed by a reverse‑chronological stream of articles. As a result, our magazines often looked more like generic blogs rather than respected, distinctive brands.
To give editors greater flexibility and reinforce each brand’s identity, we developed Custom Feeds—a modular system of logic and building blocks that enabled grouping, styling, customization, and curation within a graphical editor.
Product designers shaped the foundation of this system by proposing and designing the blocks and layout options that defined the visual presentation of each site. Design responsibilities included setting and approving the art direction, developing the styling, and committing the underlying CSS directly to the codebase.
The Custom Feeds project not only modernized our platform but the common patterns also laid the groundwork for our evolving design system.
PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS
Design Lead (mid 2019-2020)
Front-end styling and theme development
Visual QA across platforms on all major browsers, and devices
In the second half of 2019 as design lead I managed a team of four designers through the end‑to‑end process of theming, development, QA, and launch of over two dozen sites
Proper respect goes out to Theresa Mershon + Katie Maclachlan for creative direction and design team leadership. Artem Artemov for UI/UX of Custom Feeds, the entire product design team, all of the brand art directors
BACKGROUND
Custom Feeds offered a level of styling and customization that wasn't previously available to our editors. Each homepage or feed was composed of five different types of blocks. Each block had 3-5 styles each, meaning that a single site required at least two dozen different variations in mobile, tablet, and desktop breakpoints
