Content strategy · Design system
The content strategy behind J&J’s design system
Visit jnj.com today and you’re still looking at it.
The project
Johnson & Johnson set out to build one design system for its entire global digital ecosystem: a single shared language for typography, color, layout, motion, and components across the whole experience. I was the lead content strategist supporting the effort and leading our team, and the directly responsible individual for the project itself. My job was to make sure the system was built to serve the content and the reader, not only the visual design.
What I contributed
I gave the design team a clear set of content requirements and goals, the things the system had to make possible from an editorial standpoint, and they built the system around them. Once it existed, I authored the documentation that explains how every part of it works and how to use it, the reference that designers, writers, and developers across the organization still work from.
I want to shout out to the design team, who turned my vision of a warm, editorial feel into some truly outstanding work. The visual design and the design system were the work of my peers on the visual design team. My part was the content strategy underneath it, the guide that made the design system easily implementable, and leading our team towards our goal. The documentation itself is confidential, so I can’t show anything from it here.
I defined
Design team built
I authored
Still live
How the work fit together. The system and its visuals were the design team’s build; the content strategy and the guide were mine.
Still there
It shipped as version 1.0 in early 2024, and the editorial look and feel it created is still what you see on jnj.com today, which is the strongest thing I can say about whether the content thinking underneath it was right.