PROJECT:
BEST OF ANN ARBOR 2025
ROLE:
PRODUCT DESIGNER
DATE:
SEP. 2025
LOCATION:
ANN ARBOR, MI
Best of Ann Arbor
overview.
I co-designed The Michigan Daily’s “Best of Ann Arbor 2025”—a high-visibility, annual project that showcases the city’s top student-voted favorites. Tasked with a Monopoly-inspired theme and a two-week sprint, I built the full design system, including color, typography, and component libraries, and designed both desktop and mobile experiences. Collaborating closely with another designer, engineers, and PM's, we created a playful yet polished microsite that merged editorial storytelling with strong UX foundations.
week 1 (foundation and exploration).
Goal: Translate the board-game motif into a cohesive digital language and test early ideas for navigation.
Theme translation — Explored color palettes and iconography from Monopoly to bring the concept to life without hurting readability.
Structure hypotheses — Brainstormed how the Monopoly board itself could act as the scroll feature with each property representing a category tile that users could move through horizontally, like following the game path. Could this “map-as-navigation” replace a traditional long vertical scroll while still feeling intuitive on mobile?
Low-fidelity prototypes — Built wireframes to visualize this idea and tested them internally. We struggled with arrow placement — deciding whether indicators should sit above, below, or on top of the nav bar so users knew they could click or swipe to move through categories.
week 2 (systems and refinement).
Goal: Build a scalable design system and finalize high-fidelity layouts.
Component library — Built reusable info and image cards, buttons, icons, and scroll bar assets mapped to Monopoly color groups for consistency and faster dev handoff.
Scroll-bar states — Focused on defining hover, pressed, and default states for the top scroll bar, ensuring users could clearly see where they were and when to interact.
Category grouping — Decided how to order and group categories intuitively across the board so colors felt cohesive and familiar.
results.
The final microsite featured a board-inspired scrolling experience, color-coded categories, and responsive cards that made the Best of Ann Arbor content more skimmable and visually cohesive. Each property color mapped to a category group, creating a clear visual system while keeping content easy to skim.
While we didn’t have time to collect formal engagement metrics, early feedback from editors and readers described the microsite as “fun,” “playful,” and “easy to navigate.” The newsroom noted how the redesign felt fresh yet familiar, bringing the print theme to life online.
takeaways.
This project taught me how to design under pressure — translating an editorial concept into a cohesive experience in just two weeks. Working closely with PMs and the newsroom required adaptability: refining colors, layouts, and imagery to match content constraints like article word counts and photography limitations.
I’m still learning to communicate design decisions to non-designers in ways that make them easier to understand and implement, and to involve stakeholders earlier so feedback feels more collaborative and reduces rework later in the process.
Ultimately, the sprint reinforced the importance of building systems that scale quickly, staying flexible to stakeholder feedback, and maintaining a balance between creative storytelling and functional design.
