Forbes x Google: Motion Design & Visual Systems

Designing for Google Web Stories format

In February 2020, Forbes partnered with Google to help launch a new editorial format: Web Stories. Full-screen, mobile-first, built entirely on motion and visual narrative. I was brought in to design the system that would make it work.

Over the next two years I built the motion language and visual framework from the ground up, then produced against it at a story a day.

When Google launched Web Stories globally in October 2020, they featured this work in all their launch materials — using it as the model for what the format could be, singling out the cover designs. That month the platform peaked at 2.96 million pageviews from 2.2 million users.

Nearly 90% of that audience reads them on a phone. That is the constraint the whole system was built around: full-screen, thumb-driven, and legible at a glance in whatever light someone happens to be standing in.

role

Motion designer and Art director

Team:

Alicia Hallett-Chen, Design Director, Forbes
Michael Solomon, Editor, ForbesLife
Gail Toivanen, Photo Researcher, Forbes