Laura T Holder

As a product designer and design leader, I craft innovative and resonant experiences that inspire engagement and loyalty in users and deliver measurable value to businesses. I take a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach to shaping and shipping cogent, data-rich, and often award-winning interaction experiences through strategy, research, and design.

• Team leadership and individual mentorship
• Accessible and inclusive design
• Design systems and systems thinking
• User research, testing, and synthesis
• Data and analytics-informed product work
• User advocacy
• Use cases and user journeys
• Interface and product writing
• Agile / Scrum
• Figma design and prototyping
• Adobe Creative Cloud
• Maze and research tools
• Codex, Claude Code, and agentic supported workflows

2025-present

VP Product Design, Hearst Magazines

• Lead product design for systems and publishing workflows that support more than 50 US and International brand magazine sites.

2024-2025

Independent product and content designer

• Design system deliverables, product strategy, interaction design, and content design for media and fintech clients.

2018-2023

Vox Media - Design Director & Principal Product Designer

• Member of senior design leadership across Vox, New York Magazine, and Group Nine digital properties including The Verge, Eater, Polygon, SB Nation, and related sites.
• Design Director of Chorus, Vox's enterprise SaaS CMS platform, responsible for tooling UX, UI, design system, and publishing platform integrations.
• Led tooling design and execution for The Verge's 2023 site redesign, including a new story format that doubled pageviews for live content, increased time-on-homepage 7%, and saved editorial staff 20 hours per week.
• Directed custom editorial storytelling, supportive tooling systems, workflow design, research, product strategy, and product writing.
• Contributed UX direction for Coral, a SaaS community and commenting platform, and led design for the Eater mobile app.

2008-2018

The Wall Street Journal - Graphics Design Director / Product Design Director

• Led teams of designers, developers, data journalists, reporters, and editors creating visual, data, and journalistic experiences.
• Identified and established patterns to systematize experiences and tooling for efficient publishing workflows.
• Led multidisciplinary site redesign work across typography, graphics, color, data, and paywall experiences to increase subscriptions, loyalty, pageviews, and revenue.

2006-2007

Reuters Global Media - Product Design Director

• Led UX and audience experience design for Reuters.com, Reuters.co.jp, and Reuters.co.uk consumer sites.
• Designed on-air package systems, enterprise software UX, branding, and award-winning online photography experiences.

2006

The New York Times - Interaction Designer

• Designed branding, iconography, templates, and identities for early NYT blogs.
• Contributed product, editorial, and newsletter design.

2005

Daylo.com - Creative Director, Co-founder

• Led product, usability research, and design for a creative services marketplace startup.
• Directed identity, marketing, and branding.

1997-2001

CBS News - Associate Creative Director

• Directed online presence for CBS News and Entertainment, including networks and more than 200 affiliate sites.
• Worked across information architecture, taxonomy, templating abstractions, HTML, and CSS for network and affiliate systems.

• 2023 Anthem Award and Webby nomination for Language, Please
• Society for News Design Gold Medal, Silver Medal, and Awards of Excellence
• Data Journalism Best Visualization of the Year and Information is Beautiful award recognition
• Society for News Design member since 2016
• Photography exhibited at Jen Bekman Gallery and published in The New York Times, Good, Gawker, Gothamist, and other publications
• Guest lecturer at The New School Journalism + Design program; guest capstone thesis critic at The Cooper Union and Yale University

• Bachelor of Fine Arts, Iowa State University, 1991
• Furniture Design Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 1993
• Furniture Design Scholarship, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, 1996
• Continuing Painting Studies, The Cooper Union