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Allē by Allergan · Design Lead, marketing surfaces
2024

Allē
on Contentful.

Allē's marketing surfaces were stuck. Every tentpole, partner moment, or seasonal promo meant a custom build, custom QA, and a multi-week engineering cost. Marketing couldn't ship without engineering. Engineering couldn't ship anything else. I led the design side of moving Allē's marketing site onto Contentful, and turning the brand system into the way pages get built.

CMS
01 / At a Glance
Role

Design lead, marketing surfaces & component library

Timeline

2024

Team

Marketing site engineering · Brand · Marketing operations

Product

alle.com landing pages, tentpoles, partner pages

CMS

Contentful · custom component schema

Outcome

Marketing self-serve · faster campaigns · brand consistency

02 / The problem

Marketing as engineering tickets.

Allē runs a busy calendar of seasonal promos, partner moments, and product tentpoles. Pre-Contentful, every one of those required engineering: a custom React component, a stylesheet, a deploy. Marketing was creating the brief; engineering was building the page; brand was reviewing the build; bugs were getting raised against the marketing surface for being inconsistent with the product surface. Throughput was the problem and consistency was the symptom.

03 / What I led

Three layers, designed together.

A.
A · Component library, mapped to Contentful
Layer № 01

A reusable component library, mapped 1:1 to Contentful.

Designed the Figma component primitives so a marketer composing a page in the CMS sees the same building blocks a designer composes in Figma. Hero, callout, value-prop trio, FAQ, partner module, tentpole module. Each with the same names, the same variants, the same accessibility defaults on both sides of the handoff.

Layer № 02

Composition rules, codified.

Defined variants, slot constraints, copy length guides, and motion behaviour so non-designers could assemble pages without breaking the brand. The CMS editor doesn't let a marketer place a 20-word headline in a hero meant for 6, not because of a brand-police step, but because the schema doesn't allow it. Constraints are kinder than reviews.

B.
B · Composition rules & CMS schema
C.
C · Migration plan, sequenced by impact
Layer № 03

A migration plan, sequenced by impact.

Sequenced the migration of existing tentpoles by traffic and revenue impact, so the highest-leverage pages came over first and the long-tail evergreen pages came over last. Wrote the migration playbook the eng team used to retire legacy components in chunks, not in one weekend.

04 / Outcome

Pages that took weeks now take hours.

Marketing tentpoles that previously took an engineer weeks now take a marketer hours. Brand expression got more consistent, not less, as throughput went up, because the schema enforces it. The component library became the single source of truth for every consumer-facing marketing page at Allē. And when the brand refresh shipped a year later, the brand changes flowed through the same components. Every page got the new look without anyone touching individual pages.

"Constraints are kinder than reviews. Build the schema, and the brand defends itself."

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