G/O Media: one platform, a dozen brands
Gizmodo, Jezebel, Kotaku, Deadspin, Lifehacker, The Root, The Onion, The A.V. Club and more all ran on Kinja, one in-house publishing platform. The shared templates made features easy to roll out, but the brands started to blur together. For seven years I led design for the platform, and a team of six designers spread across New York, Chicago, Washington DC, and Budapest. Together we built the system that gave each site its own voice, the navigation that tied the network together, and the editorial formats built on top.
The multi-brand system
Every brand used the same templates, so branding had to live in a system, not in custom code. We split brand elements into essentials - logo, avatar, header, primary and secondary colors, links - and custom elements like drop caps, pull quotes, block quotes, and story breaks. A UI kit in Sketch and React, documented in Storybook, kept design and engineering on the same components.
- Challenge
- Support an open-ended number of brands on one set of templates without flattening their identities.
- Approach
- Define which brand elements are required and which are optional, then build them as themable components with the editorial design teams at GMG and The Onion.
- Key decision
- Treat accessibility as part of the brand system. Several brand colors failed contrast, so each site got an accessible accent and background alongside its signature color.
- Outcome
- One platform-wide component redesign with a strict accessibility focus, and new brands could launch on the platform through configuration.
Navigation redesign
After the merger with The Onion, The A.V. Club, and Clickhole, the old navigation couldn't handle 13 sites. Readers didn't know which site they were on, how sections related to it, or that the network existed at all. We rebuilt it over three iterations in 2018–2019.
- Challenge
- Help readers know where they are, find sections, and discover sister sites, while giving each brand more voice inside one consistent UI.
- Approach
- Competitive analysis and a ranked list of reader, editor, and advertiser needs. Two design sprints, three prototypes (Magic Cards, ODC, Kibbon), 24 user interviews across two testing rounds, and 6 A/B tests. Team: 5 designers, 2 PMs, 7 engineers. I led planning and process, with hands-on work in every phase from research to responsive front-end and QA.
- Key decision
- Round 1 showed no single winner: the Kibbon explained each site best, the Magic Cards explained the network best. We merged them - site and section navigation on top, network cards below - and dropped labels like "Explore" and "Our Network" that testers misread.
- Outcome
- Task success rose from 72% to 94.4% between rounds, and 100% of round 2 testers correctly identified the parent site. In production, navigation CTR rose from 7.89% to 9.3% on desktop and 4.67% to 5.64% on mobile.
Editorial templates
Longform features and commerce posts were where the brand system had to stretch the most: richer layouts, bigger imagery, and product content that still had to read like journalism.
Earlier: Gawker Media (2011–2014)
Before the Gizmodo Media era, I designed the platform's first mobile experience for 7+ Gawker sites, which drove a 50%+ increase in mobile traffic, and worked with sales to launch new ad formats.