My Role

Promoted to Head of Design after demonstrating ownership beyond the individual contributor scope. I built the design function from the ground up — strategy, team, system, and process — while simultaneously leading the full platform redesign. This was a dual mandate: ship a better product and build the infrastructure for the team to keep shipping at quality.

  • Design Leadership: Built and led the design team. Established standards, review cadence, and cross-team alignment between design, product, and engineering.
  • Brand & Product Direction: Led full rebranding — repositioning Layerr's visual and strategic identity to support mainstream adoption of a Web3-native platform.
  • UX Strategy: Defined product direction through user research, partner feedback, and competitive analysis. Translated signal into prioritized design decisions, not feature lists.
  • Platform Architecture: Led IA restructuring, interaction redesign, and information hierarchy — rebuilding the product's structural foundation, not just its visual layer.
  • Design System: Architected a scalable component library, token system, and governance model. Enabled the team to ship consistently without re-solving the same problems sprint over sprint.
  • AI Readiness: Structured the design system and interaction model to support future AI-driven personalization — dynamic content surfaces, adaptive flows, and context-aware NFT discovery.

Design Challenges

Layerr had traction but no design foundation. When I took ownership, the product had unclear direction, a broken UI, and a UX that exposed blockchain complexity instead of abstracting it. I defined what needed to be true structurally before any surface-level design work could hold.

  • No Product Direction: Established design principles and platform goals — the shared foundation all execution depended on.
  • Broken UI System: Rebuilt the interface from the component level — not a reskin, but a structural replacement that could support the new product architecture.
  • UX Complexity: Redesigned core flows to Web2 standards, abstracting blockchain mechanics while preserving decentralized functionality. The tradeoff: scope creep risk. The decision: full IA overhaul in parallel with visual work.
  • Cross-Surface Consistency: Redesigned IA, flows, and visual language simultaneously without breaking engineering continuity — required constant cross-team alignment with product and eng leads.
  • Adoption Architecture: Built the interaction model that made Web3 accessible to mainstream users — the single most leveraged design decision in the platform.

Platform Overhaul

The overhaul touched every layer: information architecture, interaction model, visual system, and component infrastructure. The standard was simple — the platform had to feel Web2-native to users while running Web3 underneath. Every design decision was evaluated against that constraint.

Design System

I architected Layerr's design system from zero: token system, component library, style guide, and contribution governance. The system became the team's shared contract — enabling cross-team consistency and reducing redundant design and engineering work as the platform grew.

  • Token System: Defined color, typography, and spacing tokens — the atomic layer that all components and themes inherit, enabling scalable visual consistency.
  • Governance: Built contribution and update processes so the system stayed current without becoming a bottleneck. Living infrastructure, not a static deliverable.
  • Engineering Alignment: Drove adoption across design and engineering through structured onboarding — reducing integration overhead and aligning teams on a shared implementation standard.
  • Impact: Reduced design-to-development friction. Enabled faster iteration. Established the scalable foundation for AI-driven and dynamic UI surfaces in future product phases.

  • Audit: Full audit of existing assets and workflows before building — scoped the system around real usage gaps, not theoretical completeness.
  • Architecture: Centralized component library, token system, documentation, and design principles as a single source of truth for all cross-team product work.
  • Components: Every UI pattern — navigation, forms, data displays, actions — defined as reusable, composable primitives. Engineers could implement without design interpretation.

AB Testing

Prototype: Navigating the User Flow for Project and Collection Management.

Introduction to Light Mode

Light mode was a product decision, not a design exercise. The dark-only interface was a barrier for mainstream adoption. I built both themes as a token-based system — switchable modes sharing the same component architecture, not separate designs. Any new component supports both themes automatically.

Conclusion

Impact: Layerr went from a product with no design foundation to one with a scalable system, a structured team, and a platform architecture capable of supporting mainstream scale. The design system eliminated redundant work across cross-team sprints. The interaction model became the template for onboarding new feature surfaces. Established the foundation for AI-driven personalization, dynamic content discovery, and adaptive creator flows.