Three Condé Nast titles, rebuilt from the ground up. Not restyled, rethought: what each brand was, and how a reader actually moved through it.
Condé Nast came in to relaunch three of its properties over the course of fifteen months (GQ, then Architectural Digest, then SELF), each with its own history, its own audience, and its own editorial voice. At the time, the portfolio ran on twenty-three separate codebases across its titles. The job wasn't a coat of paint on three sites. It was to rethink what each brand actually was, and how a reader moved through it, then find the shared engineering underneath that could carry all of them without flattening any of them.
Each relaunch is a full rethink of structure, not just surface: the way a story opens, the way a reader moves from one piece to the next, the way each brand's voice comes through in layout and pacing rather than just a logo and a color palette. Underneath, the three brands run on one shared, customizable product: a single platform built to flex per title instead of a bespoke build for each. That consolidation took the portfolio from twenty-three separate codebases down to one, and each subsequent launch built on the platform work of the one before it.
The performance work wasn't cosmetic. Start render improved 467%; speed index improved 133%, the kind of gain that moves organic search on its own, with no extra SEO work required. The shared platform went on to become Condé Nast's new standard for how these relaunches get built.
In order · July 2015 → September 2016
The first of the three. GQ shipped with a revamped home page, a new slideshow format, expanded content sections, and in-stream ads designed to earn attention rather than intrude on it. The relaunch cut average page load time by roughly four seconds, a change readers feel before they notice, and one that carried directly into search and time-on-site.
Two months after GQ, Architectural Digest relaunched as a fully responsive site across mobile, tablet, and desktop, a first for the title. The redesign leaned into the brand's photography with large-scale images, clarified the navigation, opened up new content sections, rebuilt search, and layered in social sharing at the story level. Page load times improved alongside the visual overhaul.
The third launch, one year on from AD. SELF shipped with a lively, more sophisticated layout, bold editorial features, an expanded advertising product, and a reimagined path through the site. Post-launch, SELF ranked in the top three of all Condé Nast brands for performance (page speed, speed index, and start render time), which set the internal benchmark the rest of the portfolio's relaunches were measured against.
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