Designing Presentation Systems at Scale
Role: Senior Product Designer /iWork Team
Tools: Keynote, Pages, and Numbers
As a Product Designer on Apple’s iWork team, I designed scalable template systems across Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, improving usability and visual consistency across macOS, iOS, and iCloud.
These templates ship with the iWork suite and are available to millions of users worldwide who open Keynote, Pages, or Numbers on Apple devices or through iCloud.
Create modern, scalable template systems for Apple’s iWork suite that maintain visual precision, usability, and accessibility across platforms.
The goal was to balance Apple’s strong design standards with the flexibility needed for millions of users creating presentations, reports, and data visualizations.
When I joined the project, many of the existing templates felt outdated and limited, offering few layout options for modern presentation styles. The challenge was to design theme systems that were both simple for everyday users and flexible enough for more advanced content creation.
I worked on theme systems across Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, helping design and refine templates used across Apple’s productivity tools.
I partnered closely with engineering to ensure these themes worked seamlessly across macOS, iOS, and iCloud, maintaining Apple’s high standards for visual precision.
Working on the layout and colors for the Bold Color Keynote theme.
I approached themes as design systems rather than individual layouts.
This meant focusing on:
• typography hierarchy
• grid structure
• color systems
• accessibility and readability
I worked closely with engineers to resolve edge cases and ensure the themes behaved consistently across platforms.
Some of the edge cases we addressed included:
Long presentation titles breaking layout hierarchy
Charts needing to adapt to different data sizes
Layout scaling between macOS, iOS, and iCloud
Improving accessibility through stronger color contrast and typography clarity
The goal was to create templates that maintained clarity and flexibility across many real-world presentation scenarios.
The templates contributed to the design system used across Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, part of Apple’s iWork productivity suite.
These templates are available by default to millions of users worldwide across macOS, iOS, and iCloud, helping people create presentations, reports, and data visualizations with consistent design foundations.