I directed design at Vercel for two years—leading the Design Engineering team and crafting the interface alongside it, pushing design forward on all fronts: thinking and process, polish in the product, a brand identity carried through every medium.
My first job was to take stock of Vercel's design. Rapid growth had let many marketing and product elements drift apart, so I tasked myself with bringing them back together—one design team, one shared vision, and a coherent dialogue with the rest of the organisation.
The tangible outcome was a visual language that seamlessly connected the story told on the site, social channels and events with the product experience itself. Much of the work below ran in parallel—iconography, interface and process design each strengthening the others.
System
The first hands-on question was how to bring polished design, in volume, to 400+ employees. Vercel's developers adopt improvements rapidly, so I designed an updated Geist Design System, partnering with Emil Kowalski to develop it. It stands on Paco Coursey's early components.
We consolidated the repeated and custom elements sprawling across the product, brought the text to WCAG compliance alongside Kevin Rupert's improved colour contrast ratios, and established a 1:1 relationship between Figma and the Next.js components—a shared dialogue between ideation and implementation.
Every component was drawn with the incoming Geist font by basement.studio in mind—a typeface with Swiss roots, bringing clarity and precision to what developers and designers read all day.
To pair with it I took the geometric principles of Swiss design and aimed for an edgier icon than most—hard caps, consistent angles across the board. Every glyph was drawn at 16×16px with a 1.5pt stroke, optimised for HiDPI displays and made to sit comfortably beside small UI.
The set started at 450+ and keeps growing with contributions from the rest of the design team. A highly technical product demands absolute precision when the metaphor is sixteen pixels wide.
All of it converged on the revised Vercel dashboard: accessible colours and typography, new icons, shared components, interaction improvements, and well-considered responsive views.
Process
Individual assets aren't much use without examples in context, organised in a way that doesn't restrict creativity. At the same time, feeding 200+ developers requires being fastidious.
I created an ecosystem of Geist libraries for internal consumption: references for atomic components, entire product views, marketing materials and other design guidance. The interlinking helped coalesce many ongoing works, bringing teams together across projects.
Organisation and demonstration aren't enough on their own, so alongside the Geist Design System documentation I wrote principles in short form, to guide the team's thinking as brand and product evolve.
Identity
I led design on a new take of the Vercel Homepage within a small squad of Alasdair Monk, Rauno Freiberg and Henry Heffernan. The last iteration was three years old, and the narrative around Vercel had changed. The exercise marked a meaningful evolution of the brand’s identity.
Outside of this creative vacuum, we optimised the site in collaboration with the growth team—A/B testing performance, hierarchy and conversion as the user-base grew.
I also worked closely with the rest of Design Engineering—Yasmin Pessoa, John Pham, Emil Kowalski, James Clements, Alan Daniel and Fede Alvarez—to keep designing and building the rest of the site, top to bottom.
All the outdated content was retired, important pages refreshed, and new ones introduced to tell the current Vercel story. Months of work for us, painstakingly optimising visuals, narrative and funnels toward growth.
Through the new pages, I established that marketing visuals would correlate to in-product features—not a fantastical, glossy stand-in for the experience, but a concise abstraction demonstrating what the product actually does.
To carry the identity through to where people first meet the site, I worked with Prekesh Chavda on the Open Graph image library—a consistent suite to feature wherever Vercel links are shared.
Community
Outside of my focus on brand and product, I designed the Next.js Conf 2023 and Vercel Ship 2023 sites, collaborating with Alasdair Monk and with Genny Davila, who headed the IRL and day-of experience—Yasmin Pessoa, John Pham, Henry Heffernan and Paul Henschel on the builds.
I also designed the much-needed nextjs.org update with Rauno Freiberg—spotlighting the latest improvements, and getting people using the framework faster.
Props
Within Vercel I was able to do the most meaningful work of my career so far. A huge thanks to Christopher Skillicorn and Alasdair Monk for giving me the opportunity to shine, and Genny Davila and Sam Becker for leading the design team with me.
To the stellar Design Engineering team who brought ideas to reality—Rauno Freiberg, Henry Heffernan, Yasmin Pessoa, John Pham, Emil Kowalski, Paul Henschel, James Clements, and shadcn.
Lastly, to my collaborators on Vercel's product with Timo Lins, Meg Bird, Kevin Rupert, and Justin Kropp, and on v0.dev with Mariana Castilho, and Pranathi Peri.