Amazon
Fire TV
With over 75 million active monthly users and sales of hardware units exceeding 250 million, Amazon Fire TV is a powerhouse of live and streaming video content.
My role on the Fire TV visual design team was to help evolve and unify a growing yet disheveled collection of design systems, inherited from previous teams and lacking continuity and consistency across the platform.
My Role
-Design system maintenance and evolution
-UI design, visual design
-Motion design
-Visual direction, interfacing with engineering and larger group PMs
Tools
A primary obstacle was significant design debt. Engineers frequently custom-coded components instead of utilizing established design tokens, making updating existing elements slow and inefficient. Compounding this, my team was simultaneously tasked with transitioning the entire OS from 1080p to 4K, requiring significant updates and component recreation to meet the new standard.
Because these challenges were systemic, my contributions were varied and touched many parts of the user experience.
I collaborated with numerous teams across the Fire TV organization, providing visual design support for a wide range of features and initiatives. While the projects were diverse, each was a deliberate step toward resolving the system's inconsistencies and building a more cohesive, polished, and 4K-ready product.
Design Systems—Expansion, Unification, Moderation
Action: A significant part of my contribution to Fire TV centered on design systems work, particularly around iconography and illustration. I was responsible for creating icons that adhered to the established specifications of each system, moving them through the approvals process, and directly maintaining the shared Figma libraries that designers across the organization depended on.
At the time, Fire TV was operating with three distinct design systems, each with its own legacy constraints. Much of my work involved not only designing within these systems, but also supporting Amazon’s broader initiative to reduce fragmentation and move toward unification of the EDL—Expressive Design Language. Once approved, I integrated icons into the appropriate system libraries, ensuring that assets were consistently available, discoverable, and ready for use across teams.
Result: These libraries formed the backbone of Fire TV’s design efforts across mobile, multimodal (tablet), and the core TV experience, and were used daily by interaction, UX, and visual designers alike. My contributions went beyond production: I played an active role in safeguarding adherence to the visual design spec, acting as a quality assurance checkpoint for assets before they entered circulation. By reducing design drift and reinforcing cohesion across platforms, I helped maintain a consistent and polished brand presence throughout Fire TV’s ecosystem.
Examples from parallel design systems in use at Fire TV. Each icon set was designed to spec and integrated into shared Figma libraries, supporting multiple product surfaces.
App- and feature-level iconography, illustrating how system assets scaled across product teams while maintaining visual cohesion.
Custom Illustration Work
Action: In addition to iconography, I contributed to Fire TV’s illustration system, producing custom assets to support user education around new features and flows. These illustrations were either entirely bespoke or heavily modified from existing library assets, always designed in line with the established Fire TV visual style — light, outline-based, and simplified to communicate complex ideas with clarity.
Once approved, I worked with project managers to deliver illustrations directly into development pipelines via Jira and internal tools, ensuring they reached the teams that needed them on time. To maximize reuse, I also added these assets into our shared illustration libraries, where they could support other designers and future projects.
Result: In this way, my role extended beyond production into stewardship — helping maintain consistency, expand the system, and ensure that user education materials across Fire TV reflected a cohesive and polished visual language.
Feature Rotator & Motion Design for the Ambient Experience
Action: I designed key screens and motion graphics for the Fire TV Ambient Experience, a feature that transforms the TV into a dynamic art display. My work involved designing carousel UI features for browsing different art collections and producing motion graphics "trailers." These short video assets would auto-play when a user paused on a topic, providing a dynamic preview of the art within.
Result: This combination of a clear UI and motion-based previews creates a more immersive and engaging discovery experience. The auto-playing trailers increase feature engagement and help to successfully position the Ambient Experience as a premium, "picture frame" mode for the TV, elevating it beyond a simple slideshow.
Personalized, AI-Generated Categories
Action: I led the visual design for a new feature that used an LLM to display personalized, AI-generated content categories based on a user's viewing habits. After single-handedly developing eight distinct design concepts and iterating through team critiques, I established a final direction that used a radial gradient overlay on cinematic imagery to ensure text legibility. My guidance for the AI image generation specified a photorealistic style and a "rule of thirds" composition to keep the main subject clear of the text area.
Result: I authored and delivered the complete visual design specification to the engineering team for implementation. The spec defined all necessary card attributes, text styles, and design tokens, paving the way for a highly innovative feature. This system presents users with unique, tailored categories like "Overcoming the Monster" or "Born to Defy", significantly enhancing the personalization of the Fire TV experience.
Adapting Modals for Controller Input
Action: On a very short timeline, I redesigned the parental control PIN entry modal to create a version specifically for users with a connected game controller. The existing screen was designed only for the standard remote, creating a disjointed experience for gamers. This work also required me to design a new vector icon for a game controller, as no suitable asset existed in our library.
Result: The new modal provides a more intuitive and seamless PIN entry experience for this user cohort, reducing friction and aligning the UI with the user's hardware. The game controller icon I created was a net-new contribution to the design system and was added to the core component library for use across the entire Fire TV platform.
THE RESULT
My contributions helped clear a significant backlog of visual design projects and, more importantly, elevated the final quality of numerous features shipping to millions of Fire TV users. By bringing a fresh perspective to the team's challenges, I was able to help standardize components, solve distinct usability problems, and contribute new, lasting assets to the platform's core design system.
While my contract was not structured for conversion to FTE, the experience was invaluable. It expanded my skills into the unique discipline of designing for the "10-foot" experience, a non-tactile environment that presents an entirely different set of challenges than mobile or web. Ultimately, I made a measurable impact on the Fire TV product while broadening my own capabilities as a designer.
RETROSPECTIVE
Reflecting on my time with the Amazon Fire TV visual design team, I'm incredibly proud of the wide range of contributions I was able to make across the platform. From creating new UI for core features and adapting components for new hardware, to producing motion graphics for the Ambient Experience, my focus was always on elevating the user experience and clearing a path for future innovation.
My sole regret is simply that my contract wasn't longer, as I was energized by the team's challenges and would have valued the opportunity to make an even more substantial, long-term impact. Nevertheless, I am confident that the projects I delivered helped to solve key usability problems and measurably improved the Fire TV product for its millions of users.
