Product Design (freelance & perm) | LIONS (various)
Working with LIONS since 2019 architecting and evolving their multi-brand design system.
Establishing digital foundation for the world’s most prestigious marketing and intelligence brands.
Events & Awards brands
Marketing brands
2000
DESIGN SYSTEM V1.0 - HORIZON
Asked by Ascential to head-up a small skunkworks team to build a proof-of-concept multi-brand design system for its events and awards portfolio, including Cannes Lions and Money20/20.
Over 12 weeks, we identified 10 common components that we'd focus on to build out 5 template pages, create a lite brochure site for all brands. After a successful pilot and roll out, it later enabled LIONS to pivot it's events to a digital format during Covid, creating LIONS Live.
2018
HORIZON V2
Three years on, the system needed to evolve. Brought back by Ascential to lead the product design team, I rebuilt the design system from the ground up, migrating the team from Sketch to Figma in the process. The updated system became the foundation for a full redesign of the LIONS events and awards sites.
2021
PHOENIX V3.0
For the third iteration, the brief expanded significantly. The newly established Intelligence division needed a system capable of powering feature-rich subscription products and a growing AI roadmap.
I established a dedicated Design System team, rebuilt the Figma libraries from scratch, and architected a more flexible token system capable of scaling across an ever-growing number of brands and product surfaces.
Component library with The Work theming applied.
PRINCIPLES, PROCESS, AND PRODUCTIVITY.
Central to the system was a clear set of principles and a defined process, built for design productivity without sacrificing best practice . The system was set-up to be flexible and scaleable at it's core
UX laws and Figma setup
Colour and token setup for brands
Component library overview.
FIgma component library config
Card component example with brand styles applied.
GLOBAL INTERACTION PATTERNS.
Our biggest challenge was defining a common set of patterns and UI for global features, which would effect most of the existing experiences.
Taking a sympathetic approach, and minimising impact we redesigned every interaction aspect across the global and more unique features.
LIONS PDF viewer.
Design System internal documentation and guides.
RESULTS.
Three versions over six years. A system that bent but didn't break through a global pandemic, a company restructure, a CMS migration, and the build-out of an entirely new product division.
Today the LIONS design system underpins every digital product across events, awards, and intelligence, and the teams building on it are larger than ever.
CREDITS.
Design: Neal Matthews, Kat Mawhinney-Kam, Pelin Cobanoglu
Development: Jacek Dabkiewicz, Sean Paterson, Jacob Healey, Dav Sehmi
Product: Kate Bromage, Kerry Tse
LIONS AI Projects
Coming soon…
LIONS Events & Awards
Cannes Lions redesign & regional awards relaunch
LIONS Intelligence
Subscription sites / AI Tools
Design and built by Matthew Kempton, 2025
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