El Español

El Español is a 100% digital media outlet that disrupted the Spanish news market. As a native digital product, our competitive advantage against legacy newspapers relied entirely on user experience: speed, mobile-first responsiveness, and a premium reading interface.

Moving users from free readers to paid subscribers required an interface that communicated trust, quality and exclusivity.

I operated as a true "Hybrid Designer," bridging the gap between the creative team and engineering. I didn't just hand off mockups; I integrated directly into the development workflow, writing code and managing repositories.

In 2015, the design team was too small to handle the volume of daily news requests. We faced a bottleneck:

- We were rebuilding the same UI elements (buttons, cards, headers) repeatedly.

- Without a shared language, the "mobile-first" experience was fragmenting across devices.

- The news cycle is instant. We needed a workflow that allowed us to ship features in minutes, not days.

- I identified that most design requests were actually variations of existing patterns. This insight launched the company's first Design System.

- 1. The Audit & Documentation I led the initiative to collect, standardize, and document all UI elements. We moved from designing unique pages to assembling pages from approved components.

- 2. Architecture as Code (SASS) This is where I went beyond traditional design. I architected the SASS file structure to match the visual Information Architecture.

- I wrote and managed the CSS/SASS code to ensure that the "Design System" wasn't just a Sketch file—it was live production code.

- I worked side-by-side with frontend engineers in Git, ensuring the bridge between design intent and browser rendering was flawless.

We implemented a Lean UX process to validate ideas quickly.

Collaborative Loops: Worked directly with SEO experts and Data Analysts to base design decisions on real traffic metrics.

Rapid Prototyping: Used Sketch for high-fidelity UI and Origami Studio for complex interaction flows to test concepts before writing a single line of code.

- Drastically reduced "pixel-pushing" time, allowing the team to focus on feature strategy.

- Established a single source of truth that lived in both the design tools and the codebase.

- Built the infrastructure that allowed El Español to scale into one of the most read digital newspapers in Spain.