Chegg · Horizon Design System
Using a rebrand to raise the quality bar across Chegg’s product
I proposed Horizon, got it funded, and led the team that turned Chegg’s new brand into one product language for 7.8M subscribers. Then I built the quality bar into the system, so teams could meet it without me in every critique.
The outcome
One product language, with quality built in by default
Where it landed
Horizon became the foundation of a company-level Product Quality OKR, and Chegg’s 2025 brand guidelines still build on it.
01 · The challenge
More students than ever, and a product that looked different on every page
During the pandemic, Chegg’s usage rose 35%. Students came to us at their most stressed and found a playful brand, three versions of the logo, and pages that each looked like a different site. Fanta, the old system, had been built for a simpler product, and its legacy code blocked newer React components.
Then Chegg relaunched its brand as Horizon. The default plan was to put the new colors on Fanta’s parts.
“It feels like I’m on different websites. I wouldn’t trust this website because it looks unprofessional.”
Neesa, student, in user testing. 25% of participants were confused by Chegg’s inconsistent visuals.
02 · The insight
A rebrand is the one time a company lets you revisit old decisions instead of restyling them.
If we only changed the colors, we’d lock Fanta’s problems in under a new name. So my call was: don’t reskin Fanta. Rethink the system underneath it, and raise the quality bar across the product.
03 · My approach
Lead the brand through the product, not after it
Brand refreshes usually start in marketing and reach product last, as a reskin. We reversed that: every brand decision had to work in the product before it shipped.
01
Make the system the anchor of the refresh
With no creative director, we brought in a brand agency. My team was the product voice, the agency the brand voice, and the system was where they met. I critiqued the agency’s work with my team so accessibility and quality held.
02
Win over the skeptic
Chegg’s President pushed back on a dedicated system. I walked him through mismatched screens, which I called a “Frankensite,” and the drop-off data behind them. He later used “Frankensite” at a company all-hands, and I got the team: an engineering lead, headcount and roadmap space.
03
Run both sides of the loop
I led the system team and the product teams using it, so I saw where Horizon broke in real work: apply, learn, critique, evolve.
A quality bar the team could critique against
Keep approachable. Sharpen clarity and hierarchy. Evolve from playful to purposeful. Build in quality by default. When a design felt off, we could name what it missed instead of debating taste.
04 · Leading through disagreement
From “Andrew’s colors” vs. “Tal’s colors” to one palette
Color was the biggest point of contention on my team. Tal and Andrew each explored a direction, with files saved under their own names. Reviews became debates, and I was becoming the tie breaker.
What I did
Neither direction was wrong, but we needed one. When the agency joined, they were reshooting all the photography, so the images Andrew’s palette came from were going away. I used that moment to reset: I asked Tal and Andrew to take their names off the files and build one direction together. It wasn’t mine vs. yours; it was what’s best for the brand and the student. I kept us anchored to the persona, and we validated choices with marketing, product designers and students.
05 · Critique on a real screen
Four calls to action on one page, then one rule for every team
By 2023, teams across Chegg were shipping banners on their own. On the Q&A answer page, where students arrive stressed and short on time, four calls to action sat above the answer. I reviewed the live page with my team and named what each one was doing to the student.
Why it held
Fewer messages made each one work harder. A roadshow, accessibility training for Marketing Ops, and a pre-launch quality review kept new banners on the rules.
06 · Inside the system: tokens and theming
Built for themes from day one
My team pushed for a semantic token layer and built it side by side with engineering. We set shared rules for type, color and spacing, then turned them into tokens named by their job, like primary.dark or error.light, never raw colors. That one decision let a single system carry two very different experiences, and teams pulled from the system instead of building one-off components.
Why signed-in got its own theme
Signed out, Chegg is persuading: big, Heavy headlines win attention. Signed in, a student is working through a hard problem, often for a long time. The same weight there competes with the content and adds strain. So the signed-in theme drops to Bold and caps headlines at 32px, while marketing keeps its volume.
07 · Inside the system: accessibility
Accessibility built into the names, not checked at the end
Students come to Chegg stuck or studying for a test, so simple and easy to read is the job, and accessibility is part of that. We also had real accessibility gaps across the product, and real legal risk.
What I pushed on
I proposed naming every tone Light, Medium or Dark, so the name tells you if a pairing is safe: any Dark tone passes AA on any Light one. Swap the roles and the rule still holds, which set us up for dark mode and future themes. Chegg orange got the same treatment: orange text only on white.
08 · Inside the system: content
Words are part of the design
With Content Design, we wrote the wording rules into the component pages themselves, so teams got them by default.
09 · Inside the system: patterns
Patterns came from real product problems
Horizon’s patterns weren’t designed in a vacuum. In onboarding, a critique note, “the stepper gives no sense of completion,” became the system’s rule to show progress as text: “Step 1 of 3.” Screen readers can read it, and students know where they are.
The redesigned onboarding flow drove 7× more students adding courses.
10 · The hard part
Adoption was slow, so I made quality a company goal
Leadership backed the system, but migrating wasn’t on product teams’ roadmaps. The hardest pushback came from one team whose PM and engineers had no room for it. I helped them with the work and tied it to the Product Quality roadmap. Once it was on their list, they took it on, and their PM became the product partner on the Horizon release.
11 · Raising the bar
Great craft shouldn’t depend on me being in every critique
“Working on our design system was such a rewarding experience that taught me the true value of collaboration and a user-centered approach.”
Tal Ben-Meir, Lead Product Designer · Chegg
The team: Tal Ben-Meir, Andrew Denaro, Kaitlyn and Yuval (product design), Rachel Brown (content design), Annabelle (research), Karen (accessibility), a contract illustrator, and engineers Vinsly, Pankaj and Alon, with Gary Yip as product partner.
12 · How it evolved
The system kept raising the bar
Horizon was never finished. Because I led both the product teams and the design system team, they worked as one loop, and each release raised the floor for the next. The same thinking carried into Chegg’s 2025 brand guidelines.
01
Product teams surfaced the need
Designers on Q&A, checkout and onboarding brought real student problems, with research behind them.
02
The system team made it a pattern
What worked in one flow became a component, a token or a content rule for everyone.
03
Every team got the upgrade
The next project started from a better default: the volume dial, one orange action, and quieter learning pages.
Earlier Horizon work, then the evolved versions built on the system
13 · What I learned
One lesson, and what I’d do differently
A design system is half design and half people. Connecting UX, marketing and engineering mattered as much as getting the palette right.
Restraint is a brand decision
On a learning page, the most on-brand move is to get out of the student’s way.
What I’d do differently
Notice when I’m the bottleneck sooner
Every accessibility question came to me, and work waited. That led to Chegg’s first accessibility role. Now I watch for where I’ve become the only path, and build the role or the rule sooner.
I’d also bring the teams with the least room to migrate into the adoption plan before launch, instead of winning them over after.
A system precise enough for a new designer is precise enough for AI. Quality by default is how AI-built work stays on brand.
Next: Defining AI-Native