Unison Design System
Role Senior Designer
Company Vox Media
Unison was a major platform refactor: we migrated 350+ Vox Media sites onto one codebase and a shared design system. The effort spanned eight editorial brands—Vox, The Verge, Curbed, Eater, Polygon, Recode, Racked, and SB Nation—and aimed to speed development while preserving each brand’s voice.
Before the refactor, each brand ran a custom presentation layer on Vox Media’s content management system, which meant every change required bespoke work. Updates were slow, inconsistent, and costly. We needed a unified codebase that scaled, and a robust design system that supported diverse visual styles and editorial strategies.
The Challenge
Create a unified system to power brands now and in the future
Pictured: 1) feature stories before Unison; 2) feature stories after; 3) homepages before; and 4) homepages after.
We redesigned section-by-section: article pages, navigation, “storystreams,” search, reviews, profiles, and homepages. For each page we audited elements across brands, built baseline designs, and iterated with editorial teams. Some pages (search) came together in weeks; others (homepages) took several months. Along the way we reduced duplicate patterns and pushed for cleaner, reusable components.
Design process
To support brand expression beyond fonts and colors, we created “scenarios”—templates tailored to editorial needs. Vox kept a newspaper-like, text-forward layout; The Verge favored bold, asymmetrical visuals; SB Nation used a “morning recap” scenario to highlight last night’s sports highlights (coffee emoji included).
Baking in flexibility for brand expression
Pictured: 1) feature stories before Unison; 2) feature stories after; 3) homepages before; and 4) homepages after.
We built a robust design system with flexible components that could scale to any brand. By the end of this effort, nearly every page lived on the shared codebase, making the network faster, cleaner, and easier to maintain.
Start render times improved ~25% across article pages
On Curbed, hero clicks rose to ~9% (from 0.5%), and scrolling metrics improved
Reduced custom layouts from 81 to 43, speeding development and maintenance time
Improved accessibility (better contrast and machine-readable markup) and faster time-to-launch for new brands
Quicker product development in the future (ex. story packages)