Marianne Ashton-Booth is Head of Product Design & Design Systems at ITV, where she leads design for Growth & E-commerce and oversees Mosaic, ITV’s cross-product design system. She focuses on creating consistent and scalable experiences that connect business goals with high quality user journeys across a complex digital portfolio.
Before ITV, Marianne spent nearly seven years at CNN, where she founded and led the Vossi design system and helped modernise cnn.com for millions of global readers. She has also advised major media brands, including the Evening Standard and Internasionale, on design systems and has taught and mentored at Norwich University of the Arts and the University of Lincoln. With roots in editorial and magazine design, Marianne brings a rare blend of systems thinking, storytelling and hands-on craft to large scale product organisations.
Upcoming Talks
28 May 2026
Design systems often live in messy, shifting environments—underfunded, underloved, and battling for long-term survival. They're valuable, but too often seen as side projects instead of essential parts of the product.
In this talk, I’ll share how my fascination with cybernetics—the study of how systems self-regulate and adapt—has shaped the way I think about design systems. Using this lens, I explore what it really takes to help them grow: from building in feedback loops to planning for what's achievable now, next, and further down the line.
It’s about shifting the mindset from ‘just keeping it alive’ to creating something that’s resilient, adaptable and genuinely valued within your organisation.