Embedded Files
Service:
Product Design
Client:
The Financial Times
Year:
2025
The Problem
The Partner Content team needed to move fast, but their workflow depended heavily on designers for routine social assets. Designers became bottlenecks for low-complexity tasks. Non-designers risked breaking layouts and brand rules. Inconsistent outputs increased QA overhead. Social production didn’t scale with team demand.
The Solution
A design system for non-designers integrated within the FT UI library that scales across formats, platforms, and campaigns. It locks structural design decisions (layout, hierarchy, spacing) by only exposing safe, relevant inputs via the properties panel.
My role
I led the design and rollout of a scalable, constraint-driven social template system, encoding typography, spacing, and hierarchy rules in Figma component properties and driving adoption through structured training workshops and clear usage guidelines.
Next steps
Following the success of the social templates, I designed a complementary system for sponsored Instagram Stories, applying the same design principles with a more premium visual language. The templates use white serif typography on full-bleed imagery, with flexible layout options to complement a wide range of luxury visuals without competing for attention.
Guidelines for non-designers
I defined clear “do and don’t” usage guidelines to support non-designers when populating the templates, covering copy length, typography, image cropping, and layout behaviour. These guidelines translate design intent into practical rules, reducing errors while preserving visual quality and brand consistency across executions.
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