Where I fell in love with product design.

Origin Story

I grew into a product design role.

I joined The Onion in 2008 as a graphic and web designer. At the time, I didn't have a clear roadmap for what I wanted my career to be. I just knew I liked making things for the web, and The Onion was one of the most creatively distinct places you could do that work.

Over six years, my scope grew. I went from executing designs to leading them, eventually spearheading a full responsive redesign of theonion.com and building the iPad app that would go on to win a Webby Award. By the time I left, I had discovered what I actually wanted to do: design digital products that serve real people, at meaningful scale.

This case study is lighter on process documentation than the others. What it has instead is context: the environment that shaped how I think about design, and the project that crystallized what the work was really about.

The Environment

Designing for a brand with a voice sharper than almost anyone else's.

The Onion isn't a typical media brand. Dry, satirical, unsparing: its editorial voice is one of the most distinctive on the internet, and it created a design constraint that most digital work doesn't have: the design could never compete with the content.

Everything we built had to prime the path and support the digital content. No flourishes that distracted. No chrome that made the interface feel more important than the story. The job was to make the content as accessible and as shareable as possible, and then step aside.

That constraint turned out to be one of the most formative lessons of my career. Restraint in design isn't a limitation. It's a skill. The best interface is the one the reader never notices.

The Responsive Redesign

Rebuilding a media site for the device shift, before responsive was standard practice.

By 2012, mobile traffic to The Onion was growing fast, and the existing site wasn't built to handle it. The redesign wasn't just a visual refresh. It was a fundamental rethinking of how a content-heavy editorial site could work across every screen size, from phone to widescreen desktop.

The core challenges:

• —Information hierarchy at scale. The Onion published across multiple properties — news, entertainment, sports, local. Organizing a high-volume, multi-section publication into a coherent, navigable structure that worked at every viewport was the central design challenge.
• —Performance on mobile. Media-heavy pages on early mobile networks required deliberate decisions about image loading, ad placement, and progressive disclosure. Speed was a feature.
• —Ad integration without friction. The Onion's business model depended on advertising. The redesign had to accommodate ad units in a way that didn't destroy the reading experience, a tension that was constant and never fully resolved.
• —Brand consistency across properties. The Onion's satirical voice extended to The A.V. Club, ClickHole, and other properties. The design system had to flex across tones and audiences while maintaining recognizability.

The iPad App

A native reading experience built for a device that was still new.

The iPad app was a different kind of challenge. Where the responsive web redesign was about adapting existing content to new viewports, the iPad app was an opportunity to rethink the reading experience entirely for a new context, someone leaning back on a couch, not hunched over a laptop.

The app was designed around the reading session, not the article. Swipeable navigation, an editorial layout that felt like a magazine rather than a website, and a content strategy built around the way iPad users actually consumed media — in longer, more deliberate sessions than desktop or mobile.

The Webby recognized it. But more than the award, what the app validated was a way of thinking: that the best digital products are designed for how people use them, not just what they need from them.

What It Taught Me

Six years of lessons that still show up in how I work.