Danone
– Digital Commerce
A new digital website shop and user interface design for Aptamil, Danone
CREDITS
AKQA
Valtech
MY ROLE
UI Design
Website Design
Design System
MORE INFO
Aptamil is one of Danone's most recognised infant nutrition brands; trusted by parents navigating one of the most emotionally charged decisions they'll ever make. The existing website wasn't meeting that moment. It was cluttered, inconsistent, and difficult to navigate at a time when clarity and reassurance matter most.
Our task was to redesign the Aptamil website and build a new design system from the ground up to one that could scale across Danone's brand portfolio, reduce development friction, and most importantly, make new parents feel genuinely supported rather than overwhelmed.
From components to
a coherent experience
MY CONTRIBUTION
Working alongside UX and Creative Directors from both AKQA and Valtech, I was responsible for developing the page layouts, UI components, and visual design system with translating strategic and UX intent into an interface that felt warm, credible, and easy to navigate.
While Aptamil is more a complex design system project, I was the only designer on the team along side Creative/Design Director and UX Designer, working across multiple agencies with competing constraints. Valtech were strict on what was technically buildable. The client was bound to their existing brand guidelines. And new parents on the other end of the screen just needed to find what they were looking for without feeling overwhelmed. That tension shaped every decision.
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PAGE LAYOUTS
Designed the full suite of page templates — product pages, help articles, navigation flows — ensuring each layout served parents at different stages of their journey.
DESIGN SYSTEM
Built a tokenized component library that could scale across Danone's brand portfolio — reducing design-to-development time and maintaining visual consistency at scale.
UI COMPONENTS
Developed a new component set — buttons, cards, navigation, forms — that integrated seamlessly with the brand language while improving clarity and usability.
The Product Detail Page and Article Page. Two very different layouts, with the same challenge, the purpose is to design a lot of information feel simple for someone who doesn't have time to figure it out.
ANIMATION — DESIGN SYSTEM
A motion exploration of the tokenized design system to show how the components, colour tokens and spacing behave as a coherent system rather than a collection of individual elements. Built to demonstrate the consistency and scalability of the design language across the Aptamil platform.
RESPONSIVE LAYOUTS — DESKTOP AND MOBILE UI SCREENS
The Article Page shown across desktop and mobile, the same layout adapting cleanly across breakpoints. Getting the reading experience right on mobile was important here. Parents searching for advice are often on their phones, one-handed, tired. The layout had to work without effort.
TOKENS / COMPONENTS
The visual foundation of the design system, the colour tokens, typography scale, spacing and component library. Built to scale across Danone's brand portfolio and reduce the back and forth between design and development. Every token had to work for Aptamil but also be flexible enough to apply to other brands in the portfolio
THREE DESKTOP SCREENS
Landing page, Product Detail Page and Article Page shown together; the three core templates of the redesigned site. Seeing them side by side shows how the system holds across different content types and user needs without each page feeling like a different product.
“The most complex project
I worked on taught me the value of simplicity.”
DESIGN DECISIONS
The biggest design challenge wasn't visual, it was structural. Aptamil's existing brand language had warmth and credibility, but it wasn't built for digital scale. Components were inconsistent, spacing was arbitrary, and there was no shared vocabulary between design and development teams.
Building a tokenized design system meant making hundreds of small decisions that would compound into something much larger than any individual screen. Every token; colour, spacing, typography, radius that needed to work not just for Aptamil, but for the broader Danone portfolio. Consistency wasn't a design preference here. It was a business requirement.
IMPACT
The redesigned Aptamil experience launched successfully at aptaclub.co.uk, and the quality of the outcome led directly to further project proposals from Danone. In agency work, a client returning is the clearest signal that the work delivered on its promise.
REFLECTION
The Aptamil project was my clearest reminder of what it means to design with both hands tied. The brand colours were fixed. The typography was fixed. The front-end budget tightened mid-project. And yet the system had to hold across every page template, every component, every token, for a user who was exhausted, overwhelmed, and needed to trust what they were looking at immediately.
What I'm aware is that constraints don't limit good design. They reveal it. When it's not possible to change the colour or the typeface, the craft lives entirely in the structure, the spacing, the hierarchy, the logic underneath the surface. That's where the real design decisions were made.
The Aptamil brief wasn't about making something beautiful. It was about making something that worked when it mattered most.
THREE DESKTOP SCREENS
The full range of page templates at a glance of articles, landing page and PDP. This is the system working as intended. Warm but not decorative that designed to be trusted.