The product needed a visual identity that could be used across various touch-points as we matured. Our goal was to create the foundational brand elements that felt approachable, attractive to designers, and polished—giving our audience and internal team something tangible to believe in.

The logo design took inspiration from the Branding Brand identity and focused on geometric shapes—the idea of small pieces coming together to form the whole. The color palette was created with vibrant, saturated hues and the typography palette introduced a serif, paired with sans serif and mono fonts that brought a fresh, modern appearance to the identity—secondarily winking at our knowledge of design.

With the new identity, we were able to appear more presentable and trustworthy to new and potential customers which was important as we approached the launch of the product.

Our internal documents and presentations had a new sense of consistency and direction bringing the product from idea to reality.

We needed a website that would allow new and potential customers the ability to learn more about the product. The goal was to make it feel approachable yet professional and to be built using our product.

As the lead designer, I started with outlining content structure and the taxonomy for the site. Then, I designed the visual concepts in Figma and presented them to stakeholders. With design approval, I built the entire site in Shipcode.

We have a live site that gives our audience a place to learn about the product and begin the sales process if they're interested.

Our sales team uses it for generating new inquiries, and have received a number of new business opportunities because of it.

When I joined the team, the product had visual design inconsistencies and procedural inefficiencies for delivering work. There was no source of truth—we needed to establish a system, process, and documentation that would empower our team to be more efficient and consistent as we matured.

I started by auditing Shipcode's current state to understand what existed and find opportunities to simplify and create consistency. Then I established a design system consisting of variables, styles, and components in Figma that was based on atomic design principles—the smallest elements are used to build the medium, medium to large, and so on. I created a 3 level variable system that allowed us to control the system at different levels. I created an icon system based on IBM's Carbon Design System—we utilized open source assets and defined rules for creating new assets when needed. I designed our component library using variant sets and Figma best practices so working with components was flexible, consistent, and connected.

By creating a design system, our team was able to deliver new features faster, more consistently, and more efficiently.

The system was documented which allowed our engineers to be autonomous without pulling design into huddles and meetings.

Once we implemented the new system, the interface was polished and felt like an established product that customers could trust.

As a new startup we needed to design new features that didn't exist, address bugs, and maintain consistency with tight timelines and limited resources and capacity to bring the product from 0->1. The goal was to redefine our process for designing, implementing, and tracking work—managing risk, timeline and budget constraints along the way so we could improve our ability to ship work to production on time and on budget without accruing tech debt along the way.

As the only product designer on the Shipcode team, I wore many hats. I would lead workshops in Mural and Figjam, track and manage work in Jira, and was responsible for creating, updating, and managing our design system in Figma—I also worked with engineering to make sure it was implemented properly. I designed concepts in Figma in small iterative loops that would be presented to engineering and stakeholders for early feedback. Once I get concept approval and we're aligned on scope and requirements, I would design the feature in full—considering all edge cases and interactions. When new code was available on our staging environment, I performed design QA before code was pushed to production.

We delivered on the promise to empower non-developers with the ability to build app and web experiences without being heavily dependent on engineers—check out the Lorna Jane project for more.

Designers and marketers are able to control the design, content, and functionality of the experience.

Customers have reduced the number of agencies involved in delivering app and web solutions by using Shipcode in-house.

Reduced time it takes to ship get new work to market has allowed customers to save time, money, energy and resources.