USA TODAY Co.

Role: Principal Designer, Senior Designer, Designer, Associate Designer, Intern (2013 – 2020)

USA TODAY Co. (formerly Gannett) owns USA TODAY and 100+ local media outlets in the US. In my seven years there I fell in love with the company’s challenges of scale — we had newsrooms of all sizes, and our designs had to gracefully support the smallest local newsrooms, the national coverage and breaking news of USA TODAY, and everything in between. Our opportunity to get things right at the source, before they were multiplied to each site in the network, drew me to design systems and design ops.

I started as an intern supporting standalone mobile apps, and ultimately had the opportunity to lead the creation of a design system and support the complete redesign of the network’s core web products. I worked at USA TODAY during a time when the industry need shifted from “have a mobile presence” to something much more complex. I was steeped in opportunities to understand and balance a variety of needs at the same time: readers’ consumption habits, journalists’ workflows, ad revenue targets, a new paywall, development speed, page load time, screen sizes as small as a watch and as large as a flatscreen. The rich landscape of design challenges, combined with the gift of a large team of passionate and kind designers, made this a wonderful place for me to “grow up” as a UX designer.