Wayne Kettell

Wayne is a UK-based designer and tinkerer who builds design systems that hold up under brand ambition. He works at Condé Nast as Assoc. Design Director.

He recently led new theming features behind big editorial moments for brands like The New Yorker and Wired. Now he's readying those systems for machine authors working alongside human ones. The challenge is getting both to read the docs.

He works closely with engineering, where he learns how to push design systems creatively. How flexible does an article header need to be? For brands like Vogue, very.

Contact

Wired Women

Themed the Wired site for the Women's Issue. Built on the token system behind editorial takeovers. View example

WIRED feature story page for “The Search for Silicon Valley’s Most Powerful Woman”, led by an illustration of a purple hand moving a glowing queen across a chessboard
WIRED homepage during the Women’s Issue takeover, on a mint green background, leading with the story “A College Girl Was Exploited on Camera. A Network of Anonymous Men Got to Work”
WIRED feature story page for “Women Still Face Too Much Bullshit—in Silicon Valley and Beyond”, beside a purple, pink and green collage of women walking

Verso MCP

Led product and design on an MCP launch to help AI agents understand our design system. Rolled out to teams through lunch-and-learn talks.

Brown Bag session slides introducing the Verso and Verso Storybook MCPs, overlaid with a card on their benefits: search and discovery, prototyping, self-service and avoiding staleness
Flowchart of design system sources (Figma designs, component manifests, system docs, brand token libraries and brand settings) feeding the Figma, Storybook, Verso and Config service MCPs, which an agent chat draws on to turn a user prompt into a response

HAIR.WIRED

Launched a web presence for a local business owner. Designed in Paper and built with Claude CLI. View site

HAIR.WIRED mobile homepage: a portrait of a model under the headline “Blow-dry & silk press professional”, with a Book with Gigi button HAIR.WIRED mobile page with behind-the-scenes photos from studio and street shoots, followed by a client testimonial
HAIR.WIRED desktop homepage: three portraits side by side behind the headline “Blow-dry & silk press professional”

Figma Plugin

Created an internal tool for automating theme creation so designers can react quickly to editorial requests.

Theme Creator Figma plugin over an Architectural Digest story page for “At Home in Brooklyn, Mark Grattan Rolls Up His Sleeves”, listing burgundy and pink color styles ready to create under the prefix “barraganpink”
Architectural Digest desktop story page for “Athena Calderone Takes On a Storied Manhattan Apartment”, a photo of a woman in a cream dress leaning on a red kitchen island beside a burgundy title panel

Editor-Facing Color System

Designed a color system that makes feature packages feel premium next to daily stories. Powered by theme classes and design tokens. View example

Bon Appétit mobile feature page for “The Bon Appétit 56”, themed in a pale yellow with photos of cookies, a stew and a pie WIRED mobile feature page for “China’s AI Boyfriend Business Is Taking On a Life of Its Own”, themed in cream and red around a photo of a woman on her phone
WIRED desktop feature page for “She Was Given Up by Her Chinese Parents—and Spent 14 Years Trying to Find a Way Back”, themed in cream and red beside a pink illustration of families
Pitchfork desktop list page for “The 80 Most Anticipated Tours of 2025”, themed in dark navy beside a blue and lilac collage of performers
WIRED mobile feature page for “Where are all the AI drugs?”, themed in near-black with pink accents above a glowing video still WIRED mobile feature page for “Inside the Shadow Evacuation of Kabul”, themed in bright green with an illustration of a family walking

Layout System

Championed and led a small team to build layouts that flex to each brand's editorial strategy, helping to grow reader loyalty. Brought to life by Olivier Ramirez

A WIRED story card for “All of My Employees Are AI Agents, and So Are My Executives” broken into its parts (image, headline, dek and byline) beside two layouts of the card: image on top, and headline above the image
A WIRED story card placed in the first of four dashed card slots, with the others labelled Slot 2, Slot 3 and Slot 4
A WIRED homepage section built from layout primitives, with its pieces pulled out around it: the “DHS Has Been Collecting US Citizens’ DNA for Years” lead, a story list, the trending list and a big story card
WIRED “Today’s Picks” homepage section with a “Where Are All the AI Drugs?” lead story beside a glowing illustration, above a row of five trending stories

Token Syncing

Supported engineering on automated token syncing from Figma, giving brand designers more control over updates. Architected and built by Tim Evans

Collage of brand token docs pages: Adobe Garamond Pro and CN Sans typeface specimens, a spacing token table, easing curves for motion tokens, and component tokens for Journey subscribe buttons

Internationalization

Extended the type token system for APAC sites like Vogue Japan, so Japanese text reads naturally.

Vogue Japan homepage with a “What’s New” grid of Japanese headlines, beside a beauty story card whose Japanese title is set over a portrait of a woman with long dark hair

Other Highlights

Grew adoption of the front-end platform to over 60 brand sites. Systemized live stories so brands can cover big events as they happen, and brought design tokens to commerce, subscriptions and memberships pages.

Bon Appétit recipes page led by Adobo Mushroom Tacos, beside smaller cards for Dutch Oven No Mai Fan, Vegan Butternut Squash Soup and Apple Cider Doughnut Loaf Cake
The New Yorker’s “The Critics” section with four illustrated reviews across theater, television, art and film, including Matisse’s “The Red Studio” at MoMA and Showtime’s “The First Lady”
Five posts from WIRED’s Apple WWDC 2022 live story by Brenda Stolyar, Michael Calore and Lauren Goode, including the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with M2, iOS 16 lock screen options and a crowd photographing the keynote venue
The New Yorker’s “The Future of Democracy” special series page, its title above an illustrated crowd in red, blue and yellow holding signs and speech bubbles
Vogue product listing page with a “Cozy in Cream” edit: a grid of women’s fashion items including a belted cream blazer, suede slippers, a black wrap dress, wide-leg trousers, a cashmere sweater and a sequin midi skirt, each with brand, price and retailer
Three WIRED mobile modules: a pull quote above a story list, a “Dive Deeper” longform feature on the sci-fi writer Chen Qiufan, and a daily newsletter sign-up form over a colorful glitch illustration

About

Wayne K. is not exactly famous like his namesake Rooney. Nor does he have 14.3 million Instagram followers, 16 major career trophies, or a Bentley.

He is, however, Associate Design Director at Condé Nast on the Consumer Platform team, with a strong focus on multi-brand design systems and AI readiness.

He believes in finding simple solutions with our users at heart. If we can do this with empathy and an appetite to learn, he thinks we can make the wwworld a better place.

Currently, Wayne works remotely from sunny toasty warm rainy Manchester. Always a red.

Type set in Monument Grotesk by Dinamo. Thoughts published from Obsidian. Built with a little help from Claude.