Brand & Systems Design Leader based in San Francisco.
I’m Zandt, a Staff Designer at Meta. I shape brands, build design systems, lead teams, and sweat every detail.
About
I pair the craft brands deserve with the rigor systems demand.
Fifteen years at Apple, Google, Airbnb, and Meta, trusted with some of the world’s biggest brands and the design systems that carry them at product scale.
I’ve built the production design operating model four times: first at Google, then through teams at Airbnb and Messenger, and now for Meta Superintelligence Labs, Meta’s flagship AI division, where I run it as a team of one, backed by AI tooling I built myself.
The road there: nearly four years at Apple producing and localizing product UI for keynotes, the online store, and apple.com; Google, leading the production design team behind Search, Maps, and Identity UX; and Airbnb, back before it went public, redefining the production design team behind the Design Language System and launches like Trips. Then Facebook, later Meta: embedded with Messenger as a consultant through the Messenger 4 redesign, then managing the design systems team before choosing to return to the IC track in 2022. I wanted my hands back in the work.
Through rebrands, replatforms, reorgs, and the messy middle where marketing and product collide, the thread stays the same: identities built with uncompromising craft, and systems that engineers actually trust.
Outside of work, I spend time with my family and stay active in our local community, usually around my kids’ youth sports, with the occasional day trip to Napa. I also love to travel; my favorite recent trip was a month in Japan with my family.
Currently open to new roles, and always glad to connect.
Experience
Where I’ve worked
Meta
- Staff Designer2022 – NOWDesign Systems & Product Creative
- Senior Design Manager2020 – 2022Design Systems
- Design Consultant2018 – 2020Design Systems · contract
Airbnb
- Design Manager2016 – 2018Design Systems & Product Creative
- Design Manager2014 – 2016Production Design
Apple
- Design Lead2012 – 2014Interactive Graphic Production
- Senior Production Designer2011 – 2012Marcom
What I do
Brand, systems, and the teams behind them
Brand design
Identity that holds up on every surface, from print to product.
- Brand stewardship
- Visual systems
- Marketing & launch creative
- App Store & newsroom assets
- AI product creative
Design systems
Scalable infrastructure that helps teams build faster.
- Design tokens
- Component libraries
- System documentation
- AI production pipelines
- Governance & adoption
Team leadership
The people and practices that make quality repeatable.
- Hiring & mentoring
- Design operations
- Cross-functional partnerships
- AI workflow automation
- AI enablement
Principles
The core tenets of my design practice
Systems are living products
A system needs an owner, a roadmap, and regular releases. Anything less and it dies quietly.
Brand is what ships
Not the deck, not the guidelines PDF. An identity is only real once it survives contact with shipping product.
Quality is a habit
Premium craft isn’t a final polish pass. It’s how the work gets made from the first artboard.
Automate the busywork, protect the craft
If a task repeats, I build the tool. Automation buys back the hours that quality actually needs.
Feedback beats oversight
I ask to see work early and often; feedback lands best before decisions harden. Then I stay out of the way.
Look beyond the industry
Art, nature, and architecture are richer reference libraries than any feed. We build experiences for real people living in the real world.
FAQ
Answers to the usual questions
What kind of roles are you looking for?
Design leadership or principal IC; the level and responsibilities matter to me more than the title. I do my best work where brand and product systems meet, with real ownership of an outcome, at companies that value design as a discipline rather than a service.
Are you open to remote roles?
I’m based in San Francisco but have worked on-site, hybrid, and fully remote. I can be flexible for the right role.
How would you describe your leadership style?
Clear direction, high standards, low ego. I set the bar through my own work, give feedback early, and stay out of the way once a team has momentum.
What kind of design do you do?
All of it, on purpose. Brand, product, systems, and production have never been separate jobs for me; they’re one practice. Brand work means marketing and launch creative that holds up on the world’s biggest stages. Systems work is product design at scale: every component starts as a real product problem, with flows, states, edge cases, and accessibility to solve once, well, for every team at the same time. And production is the discipline that ships all of it at quality, on deadline.
What tools do you work in?
Figma is home base, with prototyping and motion tools in orbit and enough code to stay close to how things ship. AI is where I’ve gone deepest recently: I build MCP-driven automation, Figma plugins, and self-serve tooling that cut production work down to a fraction of the time, with Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT in the daily mix. Tools change; I pick whatever gets the team to quality fastest.
What’s your background?
I studied illustration at the Savannah College of Art and Design, which taught me to draw my way toward an idea before polishing it. That foundation in observation and craft still shapes how I approach identity and systems work today.
Contact
Let’s work together.
Happy to chat about design leadership and principal IC roles across brand, systems, and product.