Google Brand Studio

As part of the Brand Standards Team, I worked on and ran Google’s Marketing Web Standards. I acted as a web design Swiss army knife across many web systems projects, and was consistently trusted to deliver on high-profile, short-turnaround projects by Brand Studio Leadership.

ROLE
Visual Designer

YEARS
2019-2020

Design (a system) for everyone

Google has over 6,500 communications and marketing websites made by lots of different agencies and teams. Marketing Web Standards is the design system that unifies marketing websites at Google.

But in early 2019, Marketing Web Standards (MWS) was still an outdated, inflexible, sticker-sheet powered design system that was treated like a side project. I was hired to join the small team tasked with resurrecting it into a flexible, modern, accessible design system backed by user-tested components, live code and clear documentation.

I personally built the design tooling system across Sketch and Figma, redlined components for engineers, wrote documentation, crafted user testing prototypes, hosted agency trainings and office hours, and ensured the highest standard of accessibility.

Here’s a sample of work I did on this system

At our largest we were a team of 4 designers/animators/UX thinkers, a writer, a producer, and a handful of engineers. Although I was hired as a visual designer, it quickly became clear we would all be wearing multiple hats.

I eventually took over as design lead, and became responsible for multiple roles:

• Worked in partnership with producers and engineers to plan our 2020/2021 roadmap

• Became the go-to authority for any internal or external teams designing marketing websites

• Championed the adoption and value of MWS across Brand Studio

• Led design on multiple Brand Studio web projects that required knowledge and speed with using MWS. For more on that, keep reading!

Designing for the pandemic

At the very beginning of the pandemic, as the resident expert of MWS, I was briefed onto a small team meant to strategize, gather content, design, develop and launch a COVID-19 information hub within 8 days. I was one of two designers tasked with building this system of modules and templates that could be changed, updated and localized as information changed.

The site was so high-profile it had to be personally approved by CEO Sundar Pichai and the White House before it could go live. This was followed shortly after with a global launch across 40+ countries, each with unique resources and local health and safety guidelines.

Designing for racial equity

Just weeks later, the murder of George Floyd sparked a wave of conversations that brands needed to show up for. Immediately, I was put on another small team to create a website to communicate what Google will change through a series of actionable, public commitments to the Black community inside and outside of Google. This project was completed from brief to launch in 9 days.

Measuring the success of MWS

1. Before MWS, the websites above would have taken weeks to months to launch. But because of the design patterns we established and the code base powering MWS being user tested, accessible, built to Google's high standards, and rigorously QA'd we could confidently launch websites in just days.

2. We successfully complied with WCAG AA design standards and Google's internal GAR4 rating for accessibility — making this a truly best-in-class design system.

3. We successfully established clear design patterns for marketing teams across the company and became a central authority for questions and training.

4. We sold Google's senior leadership on the value of a marketing design system and effectively took MWS from a part-time project to a properly resourced design team.

5. It’s been adopted by a number of teams already. You can see living examples of this system being used on Google’s About site, Google.org, Google Maps, Digital Wellbeing and Google for Games to name a few!