The San Francisco Standard
Director of Product & Design · First Employee
I joined The San Francisco Standard in 2020 as its first employee - Director of Product & Design - to build a new kind of local news organization from nothing: the brand, the website, and the editorial tooling behind both. The mandate was simple and hard: stand up a publication that felt established on day one. For two years I led all software design and engineering - building and leading the six-person team across design, engineering, and data that designed and shipped it, owning it end to end.
01Website
The heart of it was the reader experience, built from the ground up - led by the homepage and story pages. The California Journalism Awards recognized the redesign with first place for Homepage Layout & Design and second place for Story Page Layout & Design.
The redesign started with an audit of the old site - a heavy header, dividers without purpose, no proper hero, and a layout that gave editors few ways to signal what mattered.
02BlockBeat
Alongside the reader experience I designed and built BlockBeat - a programmatically generated, data-driven newsletter, produced weekly for neighborhoods across California. Each edition assembled itself at generation time: live weather, neighborhood headlines, and civic and crime stats pulled from sources up to federal databases, laid out in the Standard’s voice with lightweight “more / less like this” controls so readers could tune what they got.
Behind it sat the editorial tooling: editors wrote with variables - drop a neighborhood crime stat into a sentence, and the pipeline filled it with that neighborhood’s number when the edition generated; data engineers supplied the variables. The sample below is a Sacramento edition; the same system wrote every neighborhood’s.
03Brand
The brand came first. The Standard needed an identity that could feel established and trustworthy while still reading as the bold, independent newcomer it was - so we built it around a single archetype, The Rebel: a constructed wordmark and square “S” icon, a deliberately spare palette of Whiteout, Ink, and the signature Highlighter yellow, and Libre Caslon carrying the editorial voice.
On top of those building blocks, a set of expressions gives the brand its texture - and the system was built to travel, holding its voice from a product screen to a press badge.
The whole system was documented in a brand book - strategy, logo, color, typography, and expressions - so anyone in the newsroom could apply it consistently.
Outcome
A brand-new newsroom found its audience fast - readership grew from zero to more than a million monthly unique visitors in under two years. The redesign lifted reader engagement 35% and articles per reader 52%, the editorial tooling cut newsroom workflow time 40%, and the California Journalism Awards recognized the redesign twice. By the time I left I’d recruited, hired, and was leading the six-person team that supported the whole organization across design, engineering, and data.