Internationalization of Website
A dynamic set of promotional designs and an interactive prototype for McDonald's website relaunch, adhering to brand guidelines and enhancing user engagement across digital platforms.
Disclaimer: This work is confidential and should be treated accordingly.
Project Objective:
During my internship at the digital lead agency Ray Sono, I led key design work for McDonald’s digital presence by driving their website relaunch and international unification efforts. My work focused on delivering high-quality visuals, a scalable design library, and interactive prototypes — ensuring brand consistency and supporting a smooth global roll-out. The objective was to create a unified look and feel for McDonald’s websites worldwide, streamline the design-to-development handover, and maintain strong performance under massive global traffic peaks.
Initial Requirements:
The main requirements for this project were defined by McDonald’s ambition to consolidate all national websites under a single, cohesive brand experience:
Develop a unified, flexible component system based on McDonald’s new Corporate Identity (CI).
Ensure the live website could handle extremely high traffic, supporting up to 80 million users at peak times during global campaigns.
Create robust design handoff material and interactive prototypes to guide developers using a heavily customized Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) CMS.
Establish the German website as the baseline for international rollout.
Design Elements:
Consistent application of McDonald’s new global campaign and brand identity.
Precise compositing, retouching, and cropping of product imagery for teasers and headers.
Creation of a reusable UI kit and multiple high-fidelity layout variations.
Interactive Adobe XD prototypes for workshops and stakeholder validation.
PSD templates prepared in all required formats to ensure cross-team alignment.
Process Highlights:
Designed microsites, landing pages, and high-fidelity UI prototypes based on the new style guide.
Built an initial UI library with modular layouts, which later exposed technical constraints in the AEM configuration (e.g., missing support for split layouts like 50/50 blocks in the first version).
Facilitated workshops at McDonald’s Germany headquarters — including a key presentation of the UI kit to all stakeholders of the internationalization project, up to the CTO of McDonald’s International Corp.
Supported sitemapping and content structuring for the German site as the foundational reference for the global rollout.
Introduced Adobe XD as the core design and layout tool, which later influenced Ray Sono’s tool stack for other large clients.
Lessons Learned:
Working with a globally recognized brand at this scale was both challenging and highly rewarding. Key learnings included:
Scalability and consistency are non-negotiable: Designing a UI kit that works across dozens of national teams requires clear guidelines, reusable modules, and robust documentation.
Tool and tech limitations matter: Even the best design systems depend on backend readiness — the first AEM build didn’t fully support some intended layouts, showing how tight coordination between design and development is critical.
Stakeholder management at scale: Presenting the UI kit and rollout strategy to multiple national teams and top-level executives, including the CTO, taught me to translate design intent into clear, strategic narratives that build buy-in.
My Role:
As the design lead during my internship, I created the full design kit, interactive prototypes, and asset templates aligned with McDonald’s CI. I managed stakeholder communication, ran workshops, and led sitemapping and content structuring for the German site — setting the foundation for the global rollout. My early adoption of Adobe XD and strategic input on tooling helped establish best practices that shaped future design processes for other major clients at Ray Sono.
