Resume

Laura T Holder Product designer and design leader shaping publishing platforms, design systems, editorial tools, and award-winning interaction experiences.

Profile

I shape and ship digital product experiences for publications and platforms, often where editorial ambition, product systems, business needs, and internal workflows intersect.

My work spans product and editorial strategy, research synthesis, UX/UI, visual design, content strategy, design systems, and team leadership, with a focus on collaborative, data-informed experiences that help people create great work with less friction and deliver measurable value to organizations.

Competencies & tools

  • 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
  • Design Agent Development
  • Codex, Claude Code, and agentic supported workflows

Select experience

VP Product Design, Hearst Magazines

  • Lead product design for systems and publishing workflows that support more than 50 US and International brand magazine sites.
  • Currently writing Design Agents skills and constitution files for product development AI harness.

Independent product and content designer

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

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.

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.

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.

The New York Times - Interaction Designer

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

Daylo.com - Creative Director, Co-founder

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

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.

Awards & affiliations

  • 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

Education

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