Website Refresh
Built a flexible web system covering 85–90% of the site with reusable components, enabling a full CMS rebuild to launch with zero errors.
Overview
As the brand matured, the site needed to grow with it: a more restrained palette, neutral pages and layouts, with bolder brand colors reserved for key brand moments, photography, and top-tier campaigns. I led the digital build, taking the system from a component audit through to a working, governed system, launched in 2024, making it more flexible without losing the restraint that defined it.
Challenge
A mature design system has to do two things that usually work against each other: get more restrained and consistent, while staying flexible enough that it doesn't need rebuilding again in two years. On top of that, one real brand decision, moving away from custom illustration, which had become oversaturated, toward photography, meant the system itself had to absorb a shift in visual language mid-flight, not just enforce an existing one.
Solution
We started with a component audit, mapping the highest-touch, most reused pieces, then worked through the information architecture from styles to components to page templates. We consolidated a mix of custom components and variations, over 50, down to around 30. A design agency handed off the initial visual direction; I helped shape it alongside another brand design lead, then I rebuilt it into functional, scalable components for our CMS, working directly with developers to bring it to life across a rich content journey in the blog experience.
When we returned to the system in 2024, the goal was flexibility without losing restraint. I was lighter on visual direction this round and more focused on operationalizing it into a working system, building and launching pages in the CMS myself and leading QA end to end.
Sample Component: Feature
Surfaces a single piece of content: heading, subheading, description, up to two CTAs, with media that supports static images, animation, or video, including layered assets for depth. Features can also group into a Set, with layouts like tabbed headings or a contextual carousel, giving teams flexibility without breaking consistency. I partnered with an animator to bring this to life on the page, replacing static screenshots with dynamic animation, adding a level of interactivity the site hadn't had before.
Reflection
The system held up. For a lean team, that was the real win: it did the job it needed to do, and the components still hold up today. 85–90% of the site now runs on reusable components, but that doesn't mean everything was designed to be standardized. The homepage and pricing page carry more customization by design, where brand and product complexity genuinely need room. Everywhere else, the system carries the weight, which is what let a small team ship a full CMS rebuild, QA'd end to end, without error.
Since then, the system has expanded to handle more: the content drawer now accommodates different image sizes, the hero component supports social proof, and new form and card designs handle different resource types. In 2025, the same system proved itself further through a resources hub migration, evidence that the consolidation held up beyond its original scope. As designer and developer capacity has fluctuated, there's a real appetite to expand how much campaign pages can flex, showing that the system's next evolution is already being asked for, not just anticipated.
Impact
