Landing page mock-ups
The current pattern library had a very plain landing page without any calls to action. I brainstormed with the design manager and another visual designer and came up with three options: "clean corporate", "dark cosmic" and "natural beauty" (my preferred option). After discussing the pluses and minuses of each, we settled on the natural landscape theme. It was the most visually appealing and easy to navigate, plus it fit in with our current cute animal mascots for our open source products, such as Flogo and Mashling.
Content template
After deciding on content for the first release, I provided interaction designers, developers, and writers with an easy-to-follow page template. They could then plug in whatever content they needed to showcase. I pushed for narrower text widths for better readability of paragraphs, while allowing for wider image blocks to better showcase graphic content.
Visual style guide
The existing style guide was a bit confusing as it featured numerous colors, grid systems and typographic hierarchies with little to no usage direction. As a first step, I reduced elements to the basics with clear indications of how each should element should be used in all product UI's. This gave us a good foundation to add to as we flesh this out into a design system.
