Holly Gressley is a design leader based in New York City with over 20 years of experience working across a wide range of industry sectors and design disciplines. I partner with technology companies, non-profits, and mission-driven startups on product design, research & strategy, and design systems. Current clients include a reproductive justice non-profit and a major music streaming company.
In my last full-time role, I led research-intensive product design work on complex production, finance, and planning tools for Netflix’s film and television studios in Los Angeles and throughout the world. In the 2010s, I led design teams at Vox Media and Quora, and consulted with clients that include Adobe, Airbnb, Apple, Dwell, IDEO, and Intuit. In the 2000s, I ran a multidisciplinary design studio in Brooklyn called Rumors, and worked with publishers including NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Condé Nast, and others on web publishing and editorial design. In my spare time, I enjoy slow travel, learning about urbanism, art, designing books and textile-based work.
My portfolio is available upon request. Please get in touch or connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, or Linkedin.
Projects
Netflix
Research, strategy, and design for production budgeting and planning tools for US-based and international Netflix studio productions.
Case study available upon request
Adobe
Research and design for a scenario planning and modeling for linear tv advertising buyer experience on Adobe Advertising Cloud platform.
Watch product tour
Vox Media publishing platform
At Vox, I managed a distributed team of designers responsible for the evolution of Chorus, Vox Media’s proprietary web-based content management system. Chorus powers storytelling across our eight brands and 325+ websites each day. Our team is focused on the creation experience. Together, we migrated and redesigned the experience of tons of new storytelling and collaboration features onto a new story editor. Our team also redesigned the editorial team dashboard, improved search and publishing capabilities based on user feedback, and built a new storytelling format called packaged content in collaboration with the Audience Experience team.
"The story editor is honestly a dream. The amount of time it took me to format anything in HTML from 2015-2016, compared to the time it takes me now, is insane: At least half my day before, now minutes."
— User survey, February 2018
Case study available upon request
Chorus design system
Our team at Vox Media has spent the last two years designing and implementing a component-based UI system and front-end framework in order to unify the user experience across our entire platform of applications. We established a look & feel style guide as a starting point. From there, we researched, defined, built and iterated on a core set of UI components. It’s been incredibly exciting to see our tools change before our eyes, and we’re excited to further evolve the design system in 2018.
Case study available upon request
Quora brand system
At Quora, I designed and implemented a full brand system from the ground up, including a full logo redesign. Read about the logo design process here.
"The "Q" in the new logo is beautiful and bold, remaining as the quick identifier of the company in social media. The rest of the letters are just as nice and bookish, supporting the knowledge premise of the Quora brand. The tiny version of the logo is my favorite part of this. That's attention to detail."
—Armin Vit, Brand New
Quora
At Quora, I worked with the product design team to refine the typography, layout, and visual design approach for our web, iOS, and Android apps. I contributed to features including Blogs, Knowledge Prizes, Writing Sessions, Feed, and Community Programs (Top Writers). I created custom icons, redesigned the about and login page, and worked on the logged out experience for the iPad app.
Visual design, art direction, and brand: 2005–2015
An archive of my visual design, art direction, and brand-focused work is available here. This site also includes some for-fun personal projects and publication/editorial design focused work.