Product & Design System
CREE8 Product Design
CREE8 helps film, TV and broadcast teams produce in the cloud, and its product looked older than the problems it solves. Working with CEO Lisa Watts, I redesigned the whole experience and built a design system that now goes from a prompt to accurate, on-system UI.
Client
CREE8
Industry
SaaS / Creative collaboration
Role
Head of Design
Year
2024
CREE8's Studio In-A-Box puts virtual workstations, storage, creative tools and remote collaboration in one place, so creative teams can go from idea to delivery without an IT department. As Head of Design, I lead brand and product design across a team spread over many countries, disciplines and time zones. The product side meant redesigning everything, from small fixes to entire workflows.
Challenge
The product looked old, had almost no UX thinking behind it and an inconsistent UI full of elements that confused people more than they helped. And there was nothing to copy. Cloud post-production is full of unique, heavy workflows nobody had designed for before, so every decision had to be worked out from scratch.
Solution
Lisa and I rebuilt the experience from the ground up, workflow by workflow. Underneath it, I built a design system with reusable components for CREE8's growing set of products. Then I closed the gap between design and code: Claude agents with task-specific skills use Figma MCP and Code Connect to map each component to its real counterpart in the product's codebase, with Storybook as visual regression. Figma went from the place screens get drawn to the context that keeps everything accurate. Today we can prompt a new workflow that follows the design system, without a Figma mockup of that screen.
Outcome
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, no mockup required.
Customers say the experience is easy and intuitive for complex, heavy workflows. The UI feels like a helper, not another layer of complexity.
NAB Product of the Year in 2025, then two more in 2026, for Studio In-A-Box and Unsegmented Growing Files.
Before
An old-looking product, little UX, and a UI that changed from screen to screen. For software meant to make complex work easier, it was adding complexity instead.
No references
Editing media while it’s still being captured, in the cloud, across continents. There’s no playbook for that. When you’re the one leading the category, you design from first principles and test with the people doing the work.
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.
Services
Product design, Design system, Design leadership, AI design workflows
Tools
Figma, Figma MCP, Code Connect, Figma Weave, Claude, Cursor, GitHub, Storybook, Linear
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