Design System
Role
Design Manager
Contributions
Product Design
Duration
2021 — 2024
Employer
Yahoo
Overview
Let’s start with the obvious: Yahoo’s consumer product ecosystem was huge. Mail, Sports, News, Finance, Weather, Fantasy Football, you name it. And each of those had its own design language, quirks, priorities, and timelines. Now imagine stitching all of that together into a single, usable design system.
Fuji wasn’t just a design system. It was a commitment to visual consistency, brand flexibility, and maybe most importantly, designer sanity. Built to serve every Yahoo designer working on consumer products, Fuji became the baseline for how we spoke the same visual language across teams, platforms, and even different brands under the Verizon Media umbrella.
Figma Library
Challenge
First up: visual drift. Each Yahoo property had evolved on its own timeline, with its own design DNA. So if you looked at Yahoo Sports and then flipped to Yahoo Finance, you’d feel like you’d walked into two completely different ecosystems. Same parent company, but the resemblance was… let’s call it distant cousin at best.
Then came the brand conundrum. When Verizon acquired Yahoo, we suddenly found ourselves working alongside sister companies like AOL, TechCrunch, and HuffPost. Some needed to retain their distinct visual identities. Others wanted to tap into shared patterns and components. Fuji needed to flex without breaking.
And finally, there was the classic: inconsistent experiences across devices and platforms. A button that looked and behaved one way on iOS, another on Android, and yet another on web. It’s the design version of “Why is the ketchup in the fridge but the mustard in the pantry?”
None of these were new problems. But the scale, the cross-team complexity, and the need for Fuji to become more than just a UI kit that was the real challenge.
Solution
We didn’t just build a library. We built trust. Fuji started small. Just a couple of us on the founding team. From the jump, we knew our success wouldn’t come from the components themselves, but from how easily other teams could adopt them.
Quick visual wins — a unified color palette, typography, spacing systems that didn’t spark Slack wars.
Multiple brand support baked into the core — tokens and theming systems that made switching between Yahoo Purple and HuffPost Green painless.
Cross-platform parity — with shared logic for interactions, states, and behavior so components didn’t feel like distant relatives depending on where you saw them.
We ran regular design reviews with product teams, built Figma kits side-by-side with developers, and kept the documentation brutally simple. No fluff. Just clarity, examples, and “copy-paste this if you’re in a hurry” energy. And when teams pushed back (and they did), we didn’t push harder we listened. Fuji grew through negotiation, not mandates.
Documentation Site
Impact
Fuji became the design system of record across Yahoo’s consumer products. It touched everything—from splash pages to complex dashboards to mobile apps. Adoption hit critical mass not because it was forced, but because it was useful.
We reduced design QA churn—engineers and designers spoke the same visual language.
We sped up product cycles—teams weren’t reinventing the same button styles 50 times over.
And for users? They got a more coherent, more polished, and frankly more Yahoo experience.
But maybe the biggest win? Fuji created space. Space for designers to think beyond pixels and patterns—space to focus on real product problems, because the system had their back. That’s the part I’m most proud of. Not just what we built, but what it made possible.