Creation Surfaces
Brand systems for how people celebrate and stay close to each other.
Personal sharing on Facebook had been declining for years as those posts moved into messaging. The goal was to get people posting to each other again, and to deepen engagement between people who actually know each other.
I led brand direction across creation surfaces in two groups — Celebration and Connection — setting the creative system, scoping the work, and leading the team that delivered it.
Celebration is the highest-intent moment there is: a known date, a specific person, motivation already present. The design job is to meet it well.
Birthdays
Over three years this went from one blocked Stories feature to a destination with generative AI inside it. I directed all three stages. Early on the work sat with an agency team and quality was missing the bar, costing the product team trust and iteration loops it didn’t have time for; I rebuilt how product and agency worked together and got delivery back on plan.
Birthday Stories — proving the thesis
The open question was whether branded creative in these moments changed behavior. Backgrounds for Birthday Stories were the test, and the product team was blocked. I resourced and directed the work to land in under two weeks against a six-week timeline.
It moved the numbers, and it unlocked engineering investment in dynamic color sampling aligned with our brand palette — a pattern later adopted for Stories upsell. Positive sharing metrics validated team investment in Birthday formats in the halves that followed.
SongGen — creating with generative AI for new AI formats
Led the team to build the visual and background system for a new AI sharing format — AI-generated birthday songs — designed to carry the user’s own expression while staying on brand.
Birthday Center — the destination
Consolidating scattered birthday moments into one place people go — a surface with 73 million daily visitors. I set the team scope and aligned partners; the team delivered the brand assets — card preview, backgrounds, and a new icon — in global Birthday Cards launch.
How it compounded
Each stage inherited what the last one earned. The Stories work bought the engineering capability, the capability made the generative work possible, and the destination gave all of it somewhere to live. By 2026 the program didn’t need me at the center of it — a designer I developed on my team was leading it.
Connection is the opposite pressure. The network is enormous, but the relationships that matter are a small handful, and broadcast posting doesn’t serve them. The work is making a small sincere gesture cheap enough that people make it.
Friendversary
Friendversary had drifted off brand. A launch was already moving with creative that didn’t hold together, so I stopped it and worked with product and design leadership on a replacement. The new designs performed better, and were carried into the AI version of the experience the following half.
“Alex balanced brand perspectives for Friendversary backgrounds with proven test results from artifacts the Growth team crafted. When test results proved users preferred an approach that deviated from the brand recommendation, Alex helped navigate brand leadership to align on launching the winning variant while maintaining brand cohesion.”
Close Friends
A top-priority company initiative, on the hypothesis that a smaller audience would increase sharing. I led the team over two halves to develop and evolve the visual design system — sharing template, Stories card, stickers, custom reactions, and an in-feed prompt. Custom reactions, the Stories card, and in-feed prompt have shipped.
