Neighborhood work clubs where your best work gets done.
Design
HTML/CSS
Switchyards operates a growing network of neighborhood work clubs across the Southeast. I joined as Sr. Web Designer for a little over a year, working as part of a small in-house design team within their marketing department. My role covered both the digital experience and the physical brand presence across their locations, from the website and membership flows to signage, campaigns, and print.
industry
Coworking / Community
project type
B2C Extension - Inhouse
role
In-house
focus area
Branding, UX/UI Design, Strategy
The Brief
Request
The owner of Switchyards reached out directly based on our previous working relationship. The team was growing and so was the club network, with an aggressive push into new cities creating a steady stream of new design needs across both digital and physical channels. The existing website was built on Squarespace, which worked up to a point but couldn't handle the complexity of managing multiple location pages at scale. Someone was needed who could own the design output across the marketing team and bring some senior oversight to an existing designer who needed more direction.
Deliverable
The majority of the design work was improving and expanding the Squarespace site within its constraints. That meant designing and coding a new mega menu, improving the membership checkout flow with better tracking, updating CSS across the site, and A/B testing new location page layouts as the club network expanded into new cities. The ongoing challenge was managing multiple location pages on a platform that wasn't built for that kind of scale. On the print and brand side, I took ownership of the quarterly Club Paper, a 48-page newspaper that became a signature piece for the brand. I handled all layout and production in InDesign across four issues, coordinating printing and distribution across 30 clubs in 8 cities. Alongside that I produced a steady volume of custom graphics for email, social, and in-club campaigns supporting new openings, seasonal promotions, and member retention.
Section of the Classifieds section I designed and spent an eternity laying out.
Spread of multiple issues of the quarterly newspaper Club Paper.
Approach
I started by auditing the existing site, screenshotting problem areas and building a wishlist of fixes before touching anything. I also combed through the Squarespace CSS to find what could be improved or cleaned up, using ChatGPT to help review the code and build out custom elements where Squarespace's native tools fell short. The mega menu was my initiative. As the club network grew it was clear the standard navigation wasn't going to scale, and Squarespace doesn't support nested folder structures natively. I worked through several iterations and eventually hacked an existing plugin to make it work. The checkout flow improvement came through collaboration with a new backend hire, moving the membership purchase experience off Stripe's server-side flow so we could properly track and retarget incomplete signups. The Club Paper production was a juggling act every issue. The creative director set the overall content direction but I owned the layout, production, and printer coordination. One of the trickier aspects was managing the four poster spreads per issue, pages that appeared on opposite ends of the InDesign file but printed on the same physical sheet. Getting those right required careful planning every time. The classifieds section alone ran eight to ten spreads per issue and consumed a significant chunk of production time. I introduced Figma and FigJam to the marketing team and the rest of the company. The team responsible for planning and building out physical club spaces ended up adopting FigJam for their own ideation and space design work, which wasn't something I anticipated but was a good sign the tools were landing. The A/B location page test was my idea after reviewing heatmap data showing that most visitors weren't reading the long intro copy before bouncing. I built alternate versions with the most actionable content pushed to the top and the brand storytelling moved lower. Early results showed improvement in page views and clicks on the membership CTA before my time there ended.
Further Reading
More custom graphic for social media and web design.
Outcome
Over the course of tenure at Switchyards, we launched 13 new clubs across multiple cities, each requiring a full suite of digital and physical assets across every phase of the opening. Several of those launches sold out their available memberships in under two minutes, driven by email and text campaigns built and coordinated through the marketing team. Site traffic grew steadily throughout. The Club Paper ran for four issues under my watch before moving to a digital format. The Figma and FigJam rollout stuck beyond the design team, with other departments adopting it for their own planning work. The A/B location page tests were showing measurable improvement in membership CTA clicks before the engagement wrapped.