Built for the next hundred projects, not today’s.

The job on paper, and the actual job

On paper I was a creative lead at Amazon MGM Studios: launch creative, presentations, and brand work across Prime Video and Amazon Studios. In practice the job was bigger than that. At a studio this size, nothing is really a one-off. Every deck you design gets rebuilt by someone else next quarter. Every launch you support becomes the template for the next one, whether you meant it to or not.

So the actual job became designing the systems that produce the work: presentation ecosystems, template and component libraries, motion standards, creative-request pipelines, and the governance that keeps twenty-plus organizations pulling from the same well. Most of it lived inside the building, which is exactly why this case study is drawn instead of screenshotted.

Solve the system, not the request

Here’s the mindset shift, and it’s the one thing I’d keep from Amazon if I had to give the rest back. If someone asks you for a deck, you can design the deck. Or you can notice that this KIND of deck gets made dozens of times a year, mostly by people who aren’t designers, and build the system so nobody starts from scratch again.

That’s what I did, over and over: template libraries, iconography, illustration frameworks, typography standards, motion libraries, and the documentation that made them usable by people who’d never met me. Production time dropped, and more importantly, the work stopped drifting. At 200 million subscribers, consistency isn’t a style choice. It’s trust.

The translator seat

A studio that size runs on translation. Marketing, product, engineering, content, and leadership can sit in the same review and hear five different meetings. My seat was in the middle: understand what each group actually needed, then turn strategy into something all of them could see, point at, and build against.

It’s the least visible part of the job, and it might be the most valuable. When the translation is good, nobody notices it happened. When it’s missing, you watch a quarter of work quietly drift apart.

Sixty pages in, four minutes out

The executive side of that seat was its own discipline: CEO and VP presentations, board-level communications, org vision narratives, keynotes, planning documents. The challenge was never making slides attractive. If a strategy took a team six months to build, you get a few minutes of an executive’s attention to land it.

That’s a design problem, and it’s compression: what survives, what goes, and what the room still remembers the next day. It’s the same skill as editing a brand system down to the three rules people will actually follow.

The one I can show

The piece that shipped publicly is Progress on Inclusion: the studio’s first report of its kind, carrying the Amazon MGM Studios name to 10,000+ employees and the 200M+ Prime Video subscriber base. Sensitive content, an enormous audience, and no existing design language for it. You can read the full report (PDF); it’s 29 pages of editorial and data design I’m still proud of.

I designed and delivered it end to end: the brand system, the editorial design, the website, and the communications creative around the launch. It had to read as credible and considered at every level, from a data table to the cover. The report grew out of the studio’s Inclusion Policy and Playbook, and I built the Playbook’s internal site too: the hub where those guidelines actually got used by productions, not just published.

What it set up

Everything I do now traces back through this role: the instinct to remove repeated work, the reusable systems, the documentation habit, the automation before “AI” was the word for it. At Amazon the question was how a system helps a team make a thousand consistent things. My current work on generative interfaces is the same question with the numbers turned up: how a system composes millions of screens without losing the quality bar. Same job. Bigger loop.