Where it started
It started as SB Nation, a sports media company with a design team of four, supporting over 300 individual team sites. Scrappy, fast, figuring it out as the audience grew. When Vox Media formed around it and the portfolio expanded to include The Verge, Polygon, Eater, Curbed, Racked, Recode, and Vox.com, the design challenge became less about craft and more about capacity.
How do you maintain quality and consistency across properties that each have their own voice, audience, and editorial identity? How do you move fast enough to keep up with a media company that’s growing faster than you can hire?
The old answer
Bodies. When you needed more output, the answer was more people. Hire designers, bring in contractors, restructure teams as priorities shifted. We did all three, sometimes simultaneously.
It worked, to a point. Vox Media was genuinely nimble for an org of its size, and the design team punched above its weight across the entire portfolio. But the model had a ceiling — and it was an expensive one. Venture capital made headcount feel like a free variable. It wasn’t. Every new property meant new headcount conversations. Every spike in demand meant a contractor search. Every restructure meant onboarding time, coordination overhead, and the inevitable inconsistency that comes from spinning people up and down.
“The best thing I did wasn’t hire more designers. It was hire young talent and grow them with the business.”
The thing I’m proudest of from that era isn’t the output — it’s the people. Hiring early-career designers and developing them as the company scaled meant the team grew in judgment, not just headcount. That investment in people is what made the quality hold across 20+ properties.
What we built
- 01 Team: 3 to 50 — Six years. Started as a three-person design group at SB Nation and built it into a 50-person department spanning the full Vox Media portfolio. Hired early-career talent and grew them with the company — that investment in people is what made quality hold as the operation scaled.
- 02 1 brand to 8 — Scaled from a single sports media brand to a portfolio of eight distinct editorial identities: SB Nation, The Verge, Polygon, Vox.com, Eater, Curbed, Racked, and Recode. Each with its own voice, audience, and visual system — all managed by one design organization.
- 03 Advertising platform — Built an advertising design platform from the ground up. Custom ad formats, brand integrations, and sponsored content templates that worked across the full portfolio without undermining editorial integrity.
- 04 Publishing platform rebuild — Led the design side of a full rebuild of the publishing platform, optimized for speed-to-market. What once required days of coordination could be pushed live across all brands in hours. Design systems that engineering could actually work within.
Two eras of scale
The Vox era taught me what scaling design actually requires. The AI era is showing me that most of that infrastructure can now be built without adding a single headcount.
Then
Bodies were
the solution
Hire, contract, restructure. Scale through people. Coordination overhead, onboarding time, quality variance. High ceiling, high cost.
Now
Systems are
the solution
Build infrastructure, deploy agents, document everything. Scale through design systems that anyone — or any model — can work within.
The judgment layer hasn’t changed. Knowing what good looks like, knowing when something is off-brand, knowing how to give direction that produces the right result, that still lives in a person. What’s changed is everything underneath it.
Why it matters now
I spent years learning how to scale design the hard way. That experience is exactly what makes AI integration legible — I know what the work requires, which means I know what to hand off and what to hold onto.
The designers who will matter most in the next few years aren’t the ones who know the most tools. They’re the ones who understand scale — what it demands, what it breaks, and how to build systems that hold up under it.