Left a Creative Director role running marketing design to pioneer the frontier of streaming TV. Built apps across seven platforms, introduced flow state thinking to content discovery, designed navigation around movie poster artwork instead of thumbnails — and produced Chromecast documentation that Google called the best they'd ever seen.
Before STARZ I was running marketing design — campaigns, print, brand work. Good money. Wrong direction. I wanted to build products, not promote them.
Streaming television in 2013 meant nobody really knew what they were doing. Netflix had just started making originals. HBO Go crashed if you looked at it wrong. I was hired to design something cinematic for a phone, a game console, and a TV dongle at the same time — figuring out what that even meant as I went. There was no template. I made one.
STARZ had three streaming brands — STARZ Play, Encore Play, MoviePlex Play — that all needed to live in one app without cannibalizing each other. The problem wasn't visual. It was structural. And it was my first real look at what product design could do at scale.
Google was courting streaming partners for Chromecast but they had a bar. You had to prove you actually understood how casting worked — the mobile sender, the TV receiver, every state in between. Most partners sent functional specs.
I produced 100 pages. Every state, every edge case, sender and receiver and every transition. Not just what the product would do — how STARZ would think about casting as a real feature, not an afterthought.
"This is the best Chromecast documentation we've seen — better than HBO and Netflix."— Google Chromecast partner team · 2013–2014
Turned Google from a doubter to a highly invested launch partner
In 2013, Figma didn't exist. Sketch was a year old. Most teams were exporting JPEGs from Photoshop and putting them in PowerPoint. I needed to cover five platforms, dozens of interaction states, and the full sender-receiver relationship at a level Google could actually validate. So I built the whole thing in InDesign.
The solution was a print design approach: InDesign with data merge and a CSV. A master template was built once — screen frame, state labels, flow annotations, footnotes, legal footer, version number. The CSV contained every screen's metadata: title, state description, interaction details, platform, version. Data merge auto-populated the template and exported the full document in minutes. What would have taken days of manual layout was reduced to a template build and a spreadsheet.
A 100-page Chromecast integration document covering iPhone, iPad, Android Mobile, Android Tablet, and Chrome browser — every sender state, every receiver state, every transition, every edge case. Flow diagrams showing the full user interaction model between sender and receiver. Screen-by-screen interaction specs with precise state descriptions. Version-controlled, legally signed, confidential. The document Google called the best they'd seen — better than HBO and Netflix.
The document covered the complete Chromecast experience lifecycle: disconnected state, cast icon discovery, device selection, connection animation (4-stage), playback buffering, in-progress controls, pause states, episodic auto-roll, idle screen management (5 min / 10 min), and the precise handoff logic between sender and receiver when users navigated away from content mid-playback. Every state that could break the experience was documented before a single line of code was written.
Three streaming services, one app, separate content rights and subscriber bases. The real constraint was licensing — merge the wrong content into a shared experience and you violated agreements. Keep the brands too separate and you'd built three apps, not one.
The solution was a role and permissions layer that determined what content each user saw based on their subscription, while presenting a unified browsing experience that let the content — not the brand separation — drive discovery. The three brands coexisted as content filters within a single system, not as three separate apps.
Every streaming service in 2013 used the same layout: small rectangular thumbnails in horizontal rows. Efficient. Completely wrong for a premium content brand.
The bet was simple: the art is the content. Movie posters — imagery cinematographers spent months crafting — were being crushed into 160×90 rectangles. That's not just ugly. It's a brand problem for a service selling premium content.
The navigation redesign put artwork first. Larger images. Full-bleed backgrounds that pulled from the content being featured. Dynamic color banners in featured sections that extracted palette from the artwork itself — so the interface became an extension of the content rather than a container for it. The browsing experience started to feel less like a catalog and more like a cinema lobby.
The tablet experience applied the artwork-first principle to touch navigation. Larger, high-quality images dominated the interface. Background imagery was integrated to create immersion — drawing users into the world of each show or movie before they pressed play. The playlist management system let users curate their own viewing queue, with add/remove interactions that felt as natural as the content itself.
The iPhone app maintained the artwork-first philosophy in a significantly more constrained canvas. The home screen explored multiple layout variations — prioritizing featured content at the top with smart use of dynamic color to keep the experience feeling cinematic rather than utilitarian. Title detail screens on mobile carried the same full-bleed art treatment as tablet, with playlist management interactions optimized for one-handed use.
PLAY merged all three STARZ brands into one content experience with an algorithm that adapted to what you'd watched and kept going. The idea was flow state — not deciding what to watch, just finding yourself watching.
It didn't ship. But the thinking — content discovery as immersion rather than browsing — was years early. The industry spent the next decade independently arriving at the same place.
Where other apps used horizontal thumbnail rows, PLAY built navigation around an algorithm that surfaced content based on movie poster artwork scale and visual weight — larger images for higher-confidence recommendations, smaller for discovery. The interface wasn't a grid of equal boxes. It was a curated visual experience that communicated editorial judgment through design hierarchy, not just metadata labels.
The STARZ app scope covered every major streaming surface of the era — a time when streaming was genuinely fragmented and each platform had its own design constraints, resolution targets, and interaction paradigms. iOS and Android for mobile. Xbox and PlayStation for game consoles with controller navigation. Roku and Fire TV for streaming sticks with remote d-pads. Nexus tablets for a hybrid touch-and-tablet context. Each required distinct design consideration while maintaining a coherent STARZ visual identity.
STARZ was where streaming stopped being a direction I wanted to go and became what I did. The Chromecast work set a standard for partner integration. The PLAY concept introduced ideas the industry spent years independently rediscovering. And it got me the call from Sling.