Advance
Auto Parts
Build the visual and interactive layer of the store — so millions could find the right part the first time.
Advance Auto Parts is one of the largest automotive aftermarket retailers in North America, serving two very different audiences at once: professional installers who need the right part fast, and DIY customers who may be standing in a driveway with a broken car. I joined as a Visual Designer on the launch of the company’s e-commerce platform.
A parts store lives or dies on confidence.
I created the visual designs and wireframes for the online customer experiences — page layouts, UI graphics, icons, and color schemesthat gave new and recurring web projects a consistent, on-brand look. A store like this survives on whether a customer believes they’ve found the correct part for their vehicle, so much of the work was really about legibility and confidence: making product information, fitment, and calls to action clear enough that people trusted what they were seeing.
The store page the work is really about — fitment selector up top, a per-product fitment check on every card: the legibility and confidence that decide whether a customer buys.
Behind the pixels: a content system.
A catalog this size only works if every page knows what it’s for. Before — and underneath — the visuals, I helped structure the content itself: a taxonomy for what each module does, an SEO copy program to make categories findable, and an inventory that kept the whole thing accountable.
| Content type | Homepage | Major category | Sub-category |
|---|---|---|---|
| Navigational | |||
| Institutional messaging | |||
| Promotional | |||
| Enhanced content | |||
| Personalized | |||
| Service |
Six content types, mapped module-by-module across every page template — so each “spot” on a page had a defined job instead of being decided ad hoc.
| Subcategory | Top 2 keywords | Header copy | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brake Pads & Rotors | brake pads · brake kits | Stop with confidence — brake pads, rotors, and complete kits matched to your exact vehicle. | ✓ reviewed |
| Batteries | car battery · replacement battery | The right battery for your make and model, with free testing and installation in-store. | ✓ reviewed |
| Oil & Chemicals | motor oil · synthetic oil | Conventional, synthetic-blend, and full-synthetic motor oil for every engine and interval. | in review |
| Wiper Blades | windshield wipers · wiper size | Find the exact wiper size for your vehicle — clear visibility in every season. | ✓ reviewed |
| Alternators & Starters | alternator · starter motor | — awaiting copy — | no copy |
An SEO deliverable I ran end to end: keyword-optimized header copy for every store subcategory, tracked through an editorial workflow with an outside vendor — and a running tally of the gaps.
Recreated from the real deliverables — the SEO Copy Master and the site content inventory. Copy shown is representative of the program’s structure (top-2 keywords + header blurb + review status), not a verbatim dump.
A retailer this size runs on a relentless calendar.
Alongside the store, I owned a steady stream of online marketing — taking responsibility for the production and design of all online-only promotions across three parallel channels:
Banner advertising
On-site and placed display units that carried each seasonal push.
Promotional email
The recurring email creative that paced the sales calendar.
Other online media
The rest of the online-only promotional surfaces, all kept on-brand.
One of my jobs was to align that creative output with the enterprise’s business rhythm, keeping the design pipeline pacing the cadence of sales and seasonal pushes without the quality slipping.
One seasonal push, produced as a system— the anchor promo, built to run across every placement on the site.
Recreated and refreshed from the shipped campaigns — same offers and brand system, cleaned up for presentation.
I helped get the designs live — and keep them working.
This was an interactive role, not just static comps. Using Flash and JavaScript I built engaging online experiences and did basic development and maintenance for web pages and applications — so I wasn’t handing off flat files and walking away. That meant tracking the changing technical parameters that affected design decisions, so what I proposed was always something we could actually ship and maintain.
From producing assets to coordinating the work.
Measure creative
Helped implement a method for testing, measuring, and improving creative effectiveness — moving promo design toward evidence about what actually performed.
Design standards
Completed an initial design-standards document and circulated it, so recurring web projects didn’t start from scratch each time.
Retire the dead weight
Developed a plan for content retirement in the publishing systems — the unglamorous work that keeps a site from accumulating stale pages.
Over time the role grew from Visual Designer toward Design Project Manager — a shift from producing individual assets to coordinating the design work across the platform.
“Going above and beyond the call of duty as a designer, she took it upon herself to learn new processes and tools to help fill some serious needs for us as we grew our operations.”
— Heath B, former colleague, Advance Auto Parts
A role that grew with the operation — and a designer who kept picking up whatever the platform needed next.
That’s the shape of the engagement better than a single metric would tell it: brand, marketing, and product meeting at the storefront, and the visual and interactive craft that made an enormous parts catalog feel navigable, trustworthy, and easy to buy from.