Theming — Craftsmanship & Horizontal Harmonization

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

My Role

Senior Design Leader defining and elevating theming across Outlook endpoints with focus on unification, accessibility, and AI integration.

Opportunity

Led critical multi-semester effort to define and elevate theming across Outlook endpoints. Dual Objectives: Unify visual experience across web, Windows, and mobile under One Outlook vision; establish Outlook as Microsoft’s theming innovation leader.

Strategic Scope: Spanned UI accessibility, cross-surface alignment, and generative AI integration. Required collaboration across four product areas, design systems, engineering, PM, and executive stakeholders.

Process

Strategic Program Leadership: Facilitated horizontal working group across multiple product teams, coordinating roadmaps, timelines, and design direction.

Design Operations: Led Figma tooling development enabling faster iteration and engineering-ready specs, significantly increasing design and build efficiency.

Accessibility Excellence: Defined contrast guidelines for image-based themes across layered substrates, light/dark modes, and fluent iconography—ensuring AA+ accessibility across all permutations.

Visual System Creation: Directed modern, cohesive Fluent wallpapers and diverse color palettes ensuring aesthetic harmony and inclusive representation.

AI Integration Leadership: Partnered with engineering and research on Themes by Copilot quality standards. Identified visual fidelity gaps, led cross-team learning sessions, and shaped quality standards impacting user-facing product.

Cross-Platform Alignment: Guided appearance settings UI for consistent user control and clarity across endpoints.

Results

Global Scale: Elements shipped to 400M+ devices including Alpine Glow consumer theme, elevating brand and improving emotional connection.

Accessibility Impact: Image theming contrast framework ensured readability across all modes, especially benefiting users with visual impairments.

Operational Excellence: Custom Figma tooling reduced iteration cycles, improved consistency, enabled rapid visual QA—becoming Microsoft model.

AI Quality Leadership: Themes by Copilot work raised generative UI design quality bar. Prompting techniques now explored by adjacent teams.

Strategic Influence: Outlook’s theming roadmap now influences Fluent and M365-wide strategies (future work under NDA).

Industry Recognition: Praised internally as milestone in horizontal design leadership—balancing systemic rigor with expressive, human-centered craft.

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