Product & Design System
CREE8 Product Design
Client
CREE8
Industry
SaaS / Creative collaboration
Role
Head of Design
Year
2024
Services
Product design, Design system, Design leadership, AI design workflows
Tools
Figma, Figma MCP, Code Connect, Figma Weave, Claude, Cursor, GitHub, Storybook, Linear
From a Frankenstein UI to a system you can talk to.
CREE8's Studio In-A-Box gives film, TV and broadcast teams virtual workstations, storage, creative tools and remote collaboration in one place, with no IT department required. As Head of Design, I lead brand and product design, working directly with CEO Lisa Watts to redesign the product end to end.
The whole UI was a Frankenstein: every screen stitched together from a different idea, with zero consistency, little clarity and nothing built to scale. On top of that, there was nothing to copy. Editing media in the cloud while it's still being captured, across continents, is a workflow nobody had designed for before.
We rebuilt the product workflow by workflow, validating every step with the people who live in it: our CX team, who hear every customer pain first, and a group of expert customers who review prototypes, debate ideas and give early feedback. Underneath, I built one design system for all of CREE8's products, then connected it to code with Claude agents, Figma MCP, Code Connect and Storybook, so new screens come out on-system from the start.
A product rebuilt end to end, from small fixes to whole workflows.
One design system across CREE8's products, mapped to production code.
New screens prompted straight into design-system-accurate UI.
Customers describe the product as easy and intuitive for complex, heavy work.
NAB Product of the Year in 2025, then two more in 2026, for Studio In-A-Box and Unsegmented Growing Files.
The process
Before: the Frankenstein
Each screen solved its own problem in its own way. Tables, buttons and patterns changed from page to page, so users had to relearn the product every time they moved.
Designed with the people who use it
There’s no playbook for cloud post-production, so we built one with our users. The CX team brings in the pain, expert customers pressure-test the prototypes, and the ideas that survive both make it into the product.
A system, not screens
Fixing screens one by one doesn’t scale across several products. A shared design system did. Every component is built once, used everywhere and matched to the code that ships.
From prompt to product
Claude agents, Figma MCP, Code Connect and Storybook turned the design system into something you can talk to. Figma is now the source of context, not the bottleneck. A prompt can produce a new workflow that already looks and behaves like CREE8.
The UI as a relief
The best feedback isn’t “it looks nice.” It’s customers telling us the product feels easy for work that is anything but. That’s the job: make the hard stuff feel light.
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