Ryan Ilano, AI-Native Design Engineer, New York.
Projects
Selected Works
-
Apple News+ & Hearst Magazines
Design Lead
Designing and building a system to publish hundreds of articles a day across every Hearst brand on Apple News, iPhone, iPad, and macOS
-
mediaOS: A Unified Design System
Design Systems & Platform Lead · Hearst Magazines
A unified, tokenized design system and CMS powering 85 magazine sites across 60+ Hearst brands on web, mobile, and Apple News from a single codebase
-
Subfolio: AI Porting AREA 17's Filesystem CMS
Design Engineer · Solo port
A decade of real client work ran on software that died in 2017, with a security hole nobody was going to patch. I brought the engine back in three weeks, solo using Claude and DeepSeek. Same folders, no server, nothing left to patch.
-
Scaling Accessible Design Systems
Accessibility Design Lead · Hearst Magazines
Shifting a11y left at Hearst: building accessibility into the process across design, development, and editorial.
-
Hearst Magazines: Custom Feeds Redesign
Design Lead · Hearst Magazines
A modular building-block system and drag-and-drop editor that let editorial teams design curated layouts without engineering
-
Output: Sundays on The Roof
Art Direction & Design, Branding. Print Digital and Hardgoods
Defining the visual language of New York’s most notorious Sunday party.
-
K2 Snowboarding Boots
Lead Designer · Noct Bureau
Designing and developing colorways, blocking, trim, and logo treatments for K2 Snowboarding Boots for the 2012-2013 season
-
The Corner: NYC Techno Record Label
Design & Art Direction
Complete creative control over a New York techno label's visual identity, credited by the genre's paper of record. Thirteen years later, a render pipeline built on the same rule.
About
I design and build. No handoff, no translation layer: I take work from Figma to HTML/CSS to production. At Hearst that ran at scale for eleven years — one design system across 85 magazine sites and 60+ brands, on a network Hearst credits with 550M website visitors. I migrated and rebranded most of that portfolio onto it myself, and a brand redesign went from two months to two days, a 95% cut. Also an automated Apple News pipeline behind an estimated $10–20M/yr revenue line, and design lead on the accessibility program that reached 95%+ WCAG 2.1 AA (Axe Monitor), with 120+ properties audited program-wide. Today the same practice runs on AI products: coding agents on real work, routed across local models, DeepSeek, and frontier APIs by what each task actually needs. I call the split Gate and Wave. Opinionated about the system. Comfortable in a diff.
I'm not against vibe code. I'm against vibe code in prod.
If that distinction matters to you, we should talk.
Get in Touch