The Walt Disney Company

For three years I helped one of the most beloved companies on earth meet its audience on every screen they carried.

As a digital creative lead at The Walt Disney Company, I worked across the full family of brands: Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, ESPN, ABC, and the Disney Parks. The mandate was deceptively simple and enormous in practice: keep the magic intact while the world moved to mobile.

The Challenge

When I arrived, most of Disney’s commerce and storytelling lived on desktop-first sites. Guests, meanwhile, were booking trips, buying merchandise, and watching content on phones and tablets. Every brand had its own voice, its own audience, and its own stakes. A responsive strategy could not flatten that; it had to protect it.

The Work

I led the move to responsive design across the portfolio, establishing patterns that let a single build adapt fluidly across devices. We rethought navigation, checkout, and editorial layouts so the experience felt native whether a guest was standing in a park queue or planning a vacation from their couch. The goal was never just to fit a smaller screen; it was to make each brand feel unmistakably itself, everywhere.

The magic could not depend on the size of the glass it arrived on. It had to survive the phone in your pocket as fully as the screen on your wall.

MagicBand

I also contributed to the design thinking around MagicBand, the wearable that turned a Disney Parks visit into a seamless, keyless, walletless experience: room key, park ticket, payment, and personalization on your wrist. It went on to drive more than $1B in downstream revenue and reshaped how the parks understood their guests.

Augmented Reality, Before It Was Everywhere

Some of the most exciting work never shipped. I prototyped augmented-reality experiences for the parks: point your phone at a wall and find a Hidden Mickey, spot Russell from Up tucked into a garden, discover characters hidden throughout the property. It was Pokemon Go roughly six years early. The technology and the moment had not quite met yet, but the instinct was right.

The Outcome

Over my time there, online commerce grew from roughly $2B to $5B. Mobile became the fastest-growing channel across the brands. The work earned nine industry awards for design and innovation, but the number I am proudest of is the one you cannot chart: the number of families who never noticed the technology at all, because the magic simply worked.