Theming — Craftsmanship & Horizontal Harmonization

Project: Inclusive, Scalable, and AI-Enhanced Theming Systems

Situation

Outlook’s theming capabilities required comprehensive elevation and unification across web, Windows, and mobile endpoints. The fragmented theming experience needed strategic leadership to establish Outlook as Microsoft’s innovation leader while ensuring accessibility compliance and supporting generative AI integration.

Business Context: This multi-semester initiative required collaboration across four product areas, design systems, engineering, PM, and executive stakeholders to achieve dual objectives: unify visual experience under One Outlook vision and position the product as the theming standard-bearer.

Task

As Senior Design Leader, I owned the complete definition and elevation of theming across all Outlook endpoints. My mandate included unifying the visual experience, ensuring accessibility compliance, and pioneering AI integration while establishing Outlook as Microsoft’s theming innovation benchmark.

Action

Strategic Program Leadership: Facilitated horizontal working group across multiple product teams, coordinating complex roadmaps, timelines, and design direction. Took ownership of cross-functional alignment while maintaining focus on user experience outcomes.

Design Operations Excellence: Led comprehensive Figma tooling development that enabled faster iteration cycles and engineering-ready specifications. This systematic approach significantly increased both design and development efficiency across teams.

Accessibility Innovation: Defined rigorous contrast guidelines for image-based themes across layered substrates, light/dark modes, and Fluent iconography. Ensured AA+ accessibility compliance across all visual permutations, prioritizing inclusive user experiences.

Visual System Leadership: Directed creation of modern, cohesive Fluent wallpapers and diverse color palettes that balanced aesthetic harmony with inclusive representation. Applied high standards while thinking big about scalable visual impact.

AI Integration Pioneer: Partnered closely with engineering and research teams on Themes by Copilot quality standards. Identified critical visual fidelity gaps, led cross-team learning sessions, and shaped quality standards that directly impacted user-facing product excellence.

Cross-Platform Consistency: Guided appearance settings UI development to ensure consistent user control and clarity across all endpoints, maintaining coherent experience regardless of platform.

Results

Global Impact: Successfully shipped theming elements to 400M+ devices including the Alpine Glow consumer theme, measurably elevating brand perception and improving emotional user connection across all platforms.

Accessibility Excellence: Image theming contrast framework ensured optimal readability across all visual modes, creating particularly meaningful improvements for users with visual impairments and setting new accessibility standards.

Operational Innovation: Custom Figma tooling reduced design iteration cycles while improving consistency and enabling rapid visual quality assurance. This systematic approach became the Microsoft model for design operations efficiency.

AI Quality Leadership: Themes by Copilot initiative raised the generative UI design quality bar across the organization. Developed prompting techniques and quality standards now being explored and adopted by adjacent product teams.

Strategic Organizational Influence: Outlook’s theming roadmap and methodologies now directly influence Fluent design system and M365-wide visual strategies, extending impact far beyond the immediate product (additional strategic work under NDA).

Industry Recognition: Achieved widespread internal recognition as a milestone in horizontal design leadership, successfully balancing systematic rigor with expressive, human-centered design craft.

Introducing Themes by Copilot on Outlook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3GycrxB7hQ