Index № mcc September 2015 · Independent Ship · 2015
MCC cover

MCC

A web platform for a century-old community, designed to outlast its own redesigns.

MCC was a redesign of the central web platform for the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, a century-old organisation with active members, events, content, and a complicated content history. It was also my first large-scale fully-remote project, with teams across three time zones.

Context

Different regions owned different modules with different priorities and workflows. The design had to give everyone a shared foundation without forcing uniformity, and had to be maintainable by contributors who wouldn’t be in the same room as the system that shipped it.

MCC events module on the web, showing the weekly calendar view (9 to 15 Jun) with time slots running 10 AM to 10 PM down the left edge. A "Weekly Economy Talks" community event sits at noon Wednesday and a "MarketingWeekNYC: Boost Profitability" podcast event sits at 5 PM Monday, each card carrying its location and tag. The header reads "Events. The Chamber Events Calendar provides a listing of all our sponsored, co-sponsored events…"

What I designed

A foundation rather than a finished product. Layout grids, typography scales, interaction logic, and component patterns documented thoroughly enough that distributed teams could work independently without breaking coherence. Design tokens, naming conventions, and templates that let contributors move fast without misalignment.

MCC Media Player on the web, under a navigation row of "News & Press / Podcasts / MCC TV" with the Podcasts tab active. The currently-playing podcast "Ransomware" by Manhattan Chamber of Commerce shows a red pause button and a red waveform that fades to grey at the playhead, with 36:02 timestamp on the right. Below it, a stack of greyed-out podcast rows: "MCC Welcomes Our New Members From May 2016", "How To Write Better Advertising Copy", "Creating Remarkable Poster Prints Through 4 Color Poster Printing", "Effective Advertising Pointers". A category dropdown and a podcast search field sit top-right.

The decision that shaped it

We could have centralised design ownership and acted as the gatekeeper for every new screen. That model is faster in the short term and brittle in the long term: the moment the central designer leaves, the system stalls. Instead I built distributed decision frameworks: principles teams could apply, not approvals they had to wait on. The trade-off was accepting that some decisions would be made differently than I would have made them, in exchange for a system that didn’t depend on me to keep working.

What it left behind

A stable, dependable platform that brought modern usability to a hundred-year-old institution. Documentation that made updates predictable across time zones. The interface still holds up a decade later, not because it was timeless, but because the structure underneath was strong enough to absorb everything that came after.

MCC "History of MCC" web section, a horizontal timeline with red dots marking 1920, 1993, 1994, 1997, 2009 and beyond. Each marker pairs a short paragraph with a vintage Manhattan photograph: 1920s rooftop skyline, 1990s street view, a black-and-white kitchen scene, schoolchildren around an early computer, and a 2000s office. The section header reads "History of MCC. Take a brief look at MCC's history."

Role

Senior Web Designer. Defined design direction, documentation system, and contribution model for remote teams.

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