A comprehensive design system that standardized UI components across multiple UMD applications, improving accessibility and development efficiency.

Product Design at Scale

The discovery phase spanned six months, involving:

This research revealed significant inconsistencies in design and functionality across university-affiliated digital properties. Given the diverse technical landscape; from PHP-based CMSs and Java applications to static sites hosted in S3 buckets - we needed a platform-agnostic approach that ensured broad adoption.

Inspired by Atomic Design principles, we structured the system with a hierarchical component model that promotes modularity, reuse, and scalability. Leveraging Web Components ensured seamless integration across multiple frontend frameworks like React, Angular, and Vue while enabling backward compatibility with legacy systems.

Discovering the Goals

The project embraced an agile, startup-style culture, with concurrent design and development sprints, iterative user feedback loops, and stakeholder validation milestones. I led the engineering effort, authoring over 2,000 commits, ensuring performance optimizations, and defining a scalable architecture.

The system evolved into multiple core libraries:

By integrating these modular layers, we created an extensible, maintainable, and performance-optimized design system that empowered developers to build custom experiences without sacrificing compliance or consistency.

Engineered Solutions

Understanding that adoption is as important as implementation, we prioritized comprehensive documentation:

By democratizing access to these resources, we ensured the system's usability for developers, designers, and non-technical users.

Open Source Adoption Strategy

The University of Maryland Design System launched with its five core principles fully realized:

The system's success is evident in measurable outcomes:

The University of Maryland's Design System demonstrates how engineering excellence, thoughtful design, and strategic leadership can transform fragmented digital experiences into a cohesive, scalable ecosystem. By combining technical innovation with human-centered design, we delivered a product that serves as the university's digital backbone, ensuring its adaptability and relevance for years.

The Impact

The University of Maryland comprises twelve colleges and schools, six divisions, and over fifty departments, creating a highly decentralized digital ecosystem. This fragmentation resulted in inconsistent branding, varied user experiences, and accessibility compliance challenges. To address these issues, we designed and implemented a scalable, platform-agnostic design system, ensuring brand consistency, accessibility, and ease of adoption across the institution's diverse digital landscape.

As the principal engineer, project lead, and manager of a nine-person team of designers and developers, I guided this initiative from conception to deployment. Over eighteen months, we launched a robust system with over forty Web Components, millions of possible UI combinations, extensive documentation, and a component model, ensuring flexibility and extensibility for campus stakeholders.

Universal Design for a Decentralized Campus

A comprehensive e-commerce solution for fresh meal delivery through dynamic shipping optimization, macro-nutrient customization, and adaptive business processes.

Algorithm Driven Logistics

The cornerstone of our platform was a sophisticated macro-nutrient calculator that transformed complex nutritional science into an intuitive user experience:

This technological innovation addressed a significant market gap: while macro-nutrient counting had been established for decades in professional athletics, it remained inaccessible to mainstream consumers due to its computational complexity.

The impact was immediate and measurable: following our implementation of the calculator, we experienced a 200% increase in order volume and significantly higher customer retention rates compared to industry averages.

Calculated Innovation

As we expanded beyond our initial 50-mile delivery radius, we encountered a critical business obstacle: shipping perishable products nationwide profitably while maintaining product integrity and customer satisfaction.

Our initial regional delivery approach revealed significant challenges:

Rather than accepting these as limitations, we engineered a comprehensive solution by developing a multi-carrier API integration system that dynamically calculated optimal shipping paths based on package characteristics, destination, and carrier-specific constraints.

This system interfaced with UPS, FedEx, USPS, and DHL APIs simultaneously, analyzing variables including package weight, quantity, delivery timing requirements, and insurance needs to determine the most cost-effective shipping method for each individual order.

The Logistics Labyrinth

While our multi-carrier system solved the customer-facing shipping cost problem, it introduced operational complexities:

To address these challenges, we implemented an advanced layer of business intelligence that optimized for both customer value and operational efficiency:

This solution allowed us to maintain competitive shipping rates while protecting our operational efficiency and margins.

Algorithmic Agility

Despite our technological innovations and efficient operations, Macro Meals ultimately faced market realities that led to its closure after a profitable first year:

Rather than pursuing additional investment rounds that would have required significant dilution, the leadership team made the strategic decision to wind down operations while still profitable, with net margins above 5%.

The technological systems and business processes developed for Macro Meals provided valuable insights and intellectual property that informed subsequent ventures:

This case illustrates how technical innovation can enable a bootstrap startup to compete effectively in a venture-funded landscape, and how engineered systems can create lasting value even beyond the lifecycle of an individual business.

Market Forces & Strategic Pivots

In 2016, the meal delivery market was experiencing explosive growth with numerous well-funded competitors vying for market share. Macro Meals entered this landscape with a unique value proposition: freshly prepared meals customized to individual macro-nutrient requirements, delivered nationwide through an intelligently optimized shipping system.

As CTO and Product Manager, I spearheaded the development of a comprehensive e-commerce platform that went from concept to production in just six months. Our proprietary shipping algorithm and nutrient calculator allowed us to achieve a remarkable 20% net profit margin during our initial launch phase, successfully competing against industry giants despite our bootstrap funding model.

Algorithmic Solutions for Perishable Commerce

A comprehensive redesign initiative that transformed the University of Maryland's digital ecosystem through sophisticated content orchestration and distribution systems.

Weaving the Institutional Tapestry

The content distribution strategy was methodically segmented into distinct implementation phases, ensuring manageable timelines and deliverables while prioritizing content categories with maximum institutional impact:

The technical architecture capitalized on the established design system components, enhancing them with sophisticated data consumption capabilities. Each content category necessitated meticulous consideration regarding data structure, update frequency protocols, and distribution methodologies.

The implementation of GraphQL as the primary API communication protocol facilitated the creation of a highly flexible query system, enabling consumers to request precisely the data elements required, thus optimizing bandwidth utilization and performance metrics across all integrated platforms.

Blueprint for Unification

The content creation and distribution strategies have fundamentally transformed the university's content management paradigm. The previous model, characterized by a limited consortium of trained content specialists, has evolved into a distributed authorship framework that empowers hundreds of contributors across the institution.

This transition from centralized to distributed content governance necessitated meticulous strategic planning:

The empowerment of distributed content creation has catalyzed a paradigm shift in reactive marketing and communication strategies. Digital properties can now be reconfigured within minutes to align with evolving content priorities, enabling unprecedented responsiveness to institutional events, research announcements, and strategic opportunities.

This enhanced adaptability was conclusively demonstrated during multiple institution-wide events, where content from diverse sources was dynamically aggregated and distributed across digital channels within hours—a process that previously required days or weeks of manual coordination and implementation.

From Gatekeepers to Orchestrators

The demonstrable success of the initiative has precipitated institutional discussions regarding a unified digital strategy for the entire campus ecosystem. The API services initially developed for the primary institutional website are undergoing strategic expansion to serve as comprehensive digital resources, encompassing additional shared content repositories and middleware components for executing complex business logic such as content translation and scheduled publishing.

This expansion has generated a self-reinforcing cycle of development and adoption across the institution:

The initiative has secured substantial additional investment for the expansion of API services across the institutional digital landscape, with a comprehensive roadmap to connect hundreds of digital properties to this unified content infrastructure. This investment represents a fundamental reorientation in the institution's approach to digital content management, transitioning from isolated information repositories to a cohesive, interconnected digital ecosystem.

Through strategic integration with the institution's design system, these content services ensure information is not only distributed with optimal efficiency but also presented with absolute consistency, regardless of its manifestation across the diverse digital landscape.

From Fragmentation to Fusion

The content automation initiative has delivered substantial, empirically verifiable benefits to the institution:

Perhaps the most significant outcome transcends quantitative measurement—the cultural transformation toward information sharing as an institutional value. Departments that previously maintained strict information sovereignty now actively contribute to the broader ecosystem, recognizing the collective benefits of participation in a unified digital strategy.

This initiative demonstrates how the judicious application of technology can transform not only digital processes but institutional culture itself. By establishing content sharing as the path of least resistance, we have created a self-sustaining system where collaboration becomes the default operational mode rather than an exceptional occurrence.

The University of Maryland now serves as an model for how large, decentralized institutions can achieve cohesive digital communication while preserving the autonomy and addressing the unique requirements of individual organizational units.

The Metrics of Transformation

The University of Maryland represents a microcosm of organizational complexity, comprising twelve colleges and schools, six divisions, and over fifty departments. This decentralization has historically presented significant challenges in maintaining synchronized content and messaging across the institution. With over 1,500 websites and applications housing millions of discrete informational elements, the establishment of robust interfaces for data synchronization became a paramount imperative.

A fundamental objective of the comprehensive redesign initiative was the automation of content authorship through strategic leverage of existing institutional content. Through the implementation of multiple API services throughout the university ecosystem, information assets including news, events, alerts, and additional content categories could be disseminated with unprecedented efficiency. This sophisticated approach enables content authors to curate rather than recreate content, substantially enhancing efficiency while ensuring consistent institutional voice across the university's expansive digital footprint.

The Symphony of Information

Explore case studies showcasing Josh Magness's experience as a software engineer and UX designer

Case Studies

Product Design at Scale

Algorithm Driven Logistics

Weaving the Institutional Tapestry