PEOPLE Magazine's App
Digital Photo Editor · 2025–2026 · New York City
The challenge
When PEOPLE launched its standalone mobile app, the visual production infrastructure didn't exist yet. My job was to improve it, and to get a large, distributed team moving in the same direction.
What I did
I became the point of contact between creative and technical stakeholders, translating visual intent into specs engineers could act on, and translating technical constraints back into decisions the editorial team could work with. I built cross-functional workflows that didn't previously exist, bridging communication gaps between teams with very different working styles and priorities.
On the asset side, I partnered closely with the design team through iterative A/B testing to establish the right visual language for the platform, balancing brand consistency across email, social, web, and the app itself. Every format had different requirements; the story had to hold across all of them.
Teams coordinated
Engineers Social media Photo editors Producers Writers & editors Video editors Design team
Phase 1 | Starting from zero The app concept existed, but the visual framework didn't. There were no standards for cover images, no gallery formats, no production workflows. I helped built the foundation: Establishing what kinds of visuals the app needed, what formats worked, and how content would move from idea to published asset.
Phase 2 | Getting everyone in sync The hardest part wasn't the tools, it was the context. We were building something new on top of an existing editorial culture, which meant adapting PEOPLE's established audience instincts to a format that had never existed before. I coordinated across teams through Slack, shared documentation, and regular syncs, creating processes from scratch rather than inheriting any.
Phase 3 | Finding the visual language With no precedent to follow, we tested our way to answers. Working closely with the design team, we experimented with how images were presented, formats, framing, visual hierarchy, and measured what landed. Success was clear when it showed up in the numbers: longer session times, more engagement. That data became the foundation for a consistent visual standard.
Phase 4 | Shipping across every surface The real challenge wasn't producing assets, it was producing them at speed, inside a daily editorial environment that wasn't built for a new workflow. Every delivery had to be right and on time, without slowing down the teams around me. Getting to that consistency was the work.