Visa
Digital Solutions
Building a Design Ecosystem
In 2015, as mobile began reshaping fintech, Visa established an in-house Digital Solutions design team, tasked with building a shared design ecosystem for its growing portfolio of digital products. The goal was to bring design and development together around a common language for payment experiences, establishing guidelines, iconography, component libraries, and best design practices that connected Visa's brand with the conventions, accessibility standards, and practical demands of digital products.
Auditing the Product Ecosystem
The work began with a full product feature audit across SDK and web — covering Visa Companion, Visa Checkout, VMCP, mVisa, Connected Card, and HCE Proximity Payments — mapping key features like sign-in, card management, payment flows, and settings across each one. From there, the process moved through phases: defining core design principles, exploring design concepts against real product flows, and finalizing the design library and style guide.
Extending the Design System
I partnered with marketing and product teams to apply the new brand guidance and design system beyond the product itself. This included infographics about customer trust and the often impersonal nature of banking, as well as branded event and print materials. Each piece drew from the same visual foundation as the digital product, creating consistency across mobile interfaces, internal events, and marketing collateral.
Design-a-Thone
Visa had never run an internal design event before Digital Solutions existed — there was no established moment for teams across the company to actually see and adopt the new guidelines. Design-a-Thon became that moment: the first event of its kind, bringing designers, engineers, and product teams from across Visa together to define and prototype new ideas for the company's Digital organization. I designed the full suite of branded materials for it, introducing teams to Visa's new visual identity and the guiding principles built to create a coherent story between Brand and User Experience.
