news.com.au

Role: Design Team Lead

news.com.au is Australia’s leading news platform, reaching an average monthly audience of over 12 million readers with coverage spanning politics, sport, lifestyle, and entertainment. Powered by a large, fast-paced newsroom, the platform delivers content across desktop, mobile, social, podcasts, and app—making the design of its content-heavy ecosystem both complex and critically important from a UX and information architecture perspective.

I joined news.com.au in 2007 as a Senior Designer at a time when the product and brand were still in their infancy. From the ground up, I contributed to shaping the visual identity and user experience of the platform, beginning with UX and UI templates for key verticals such as Entertainment. Alongside this, I partnered closely with editorial teams to create bespoke, interactive storytelling formats for major news features, as well as supporting commercial initiatives through campaign design and pitch work.

My contributions were recognised early, with nominations for Best Online Execution and Best Sales Pitch at the Creative Excellence Awards in 2009 and 2010. In late 2010, I was nominated for Designer of the Year and subsequently promoted to Design Team Lead.

In 2011, I led the redesign of news.com.au across the homepage, vertical sections, and later the mobile experience. The core ambition was to transform how news stories were presented—shifting towards a more visual, engaging, and flexible design system that could respond to the unpredictable nature of breaking news. A key innovation was enabling editors to quickly customise the homepage’s top stories with minimal reliance on design or development resources, ensuring speed and agility when major events unfolded.

We also reimagined the overall layout to be cleaner and more open, reducing text density to improve scannability and helping users quickly find the most relevant content. At the same time, we ensured the breadth of content across the broader network was still surfaced effectively.

I worked closely with Simon Wright (Creative Director), Portia Hilton (Producer), and David Lewis (Tech Lead), alongside cross-functional teams spanning design, technology, and editorial. My role focused on designing UX prototypes, developing scalable templates and UI systems, and delivering high-impact interactive stories for major events such as the Queensland floods, Cyclone Yasi, and the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. I also led and mentored a team of designers, supporting their growth from junior to senior level.

A modular approach underpinned the redesign, where features such as navigation, weather, and top stories were developed as flexible components. This was supported by ongoing user research, allowing us to continuously refine the experience based on real audience needs.

The redesign and editorial innovation were recognised at the PANPA Awards, where news.com.au won the Innovation in Digital Publishing Award in 2011. The site was celebrated for its interactive storytelling and creative execution of major news events. Following this, the Creative Director, Tech Lead, and I were nominated for a News Award, further recognising the impact of the work.