Software
meaningful work that supports creatives
celtx
a design journey
Celtx is a Powerful cloud-based suite of production tools, for which I am the principal UX & UI Designer. Celtx satisfies a varied and therefore complex, user base. The market covering all levels of engagement and skill, from students to full-time film and television writers and production teams, from part-time weekend creatives to full time game developers and designers. The software is large, detail-oriented and growing rapidly.
Philosophy
& Practise
making a product
Design at Celtx is the aggregation of all departmental ideals and the goals and dreams of users.. Through simple changes to a complex system Design at Celtx has helped create a welcoming product as well as an intelligent and powerful platform. It has been an honour to see and help it grow.
I was brought into the team as the first and often only UX and UI Designer for Celtx. I have the privilege of improving a complex system by seeing it through a user's eyes and I help to keep users the focus on every team.
Celtx is a team effort that requires constant communication between Design, Product Owners and our Engineers. Together, through design, Celtx is making creating easier.
Inspired by well researched real-world production workflows I have designed the complex web of integrated documents that make up a Celtx project into several different touch points that mirror real world workflows.
Gem
Non-Linear Narrative Asset Management
A streamlined, scalable narrative designer that allows writers and developers to visualize complex story structures easily, build quickly from templates, write scripts, and generate cusotmozed devloper data
My Contribution
Gem & Film at Celtx
Design breaks down goals and user stories into clear flows of inputs, outputs, processes and other user interactions to determine how to best achieve the goals of the team while also meeting the goals of the user - turning
The process is fairly iterative in order to prevent wasting time and resources. Each user flow, wireframe and mockup required frequent communication between design, engineers and POs. After a user flow or solution is approved by the team, design creates high fidelity mockups using established design libraries
Product Vision
Wireframes
Prototypes
UI Library
Style Guides
Design Langauge
Pixlr
a case study
2011-2016
After graduating from York University and working in the field for a few years, I accepted a job at Autodesk and soon found myself working on a unique small team within the company on very early mobile consumer apps.
Pixlr was an acquired piece of software that needed help creating an appealing and robust interface that could move into new platforms and technologies. Working with the Pixlr team we redesigned the UI from scratch.
we were tasked with creating a new, intuitive UI for mobile photo editing. In the end, after acquiring millions of users and considerable growth there was a desktop app as well as several mobile and browser-based products. I was reasonable for a wide variety of tasks and deliverables
High Fidelity Mockups
User Flows
Wireframes
Style Guides
UI Kits
Brand & Partner Content
Design
We simplified a menu-based UI for mobile by breaking the tools into units. I also designed a visual language that was used consistently throughout the app on all platforms, and is still used in the product today,
Designing a comprehensive UI and creating content for pixlr included creating everything from coded overlays to graphic filters and 'stickers' also provided me with the opportunity to create complex layouts and workflows, as well as draw icons and accent colours and patterns
Reflections
Pixlr was very successful, professionally as well as personally. Designing it was very rewarding. As a product, I loved working on it. As a designer in the adolescences of their carer, it was a wonderful, rich and privileged opportunity.
I learned as much about the logic of users as I did about the grace of working on changing teams while navigating the creative tension that can often come out of Design's relationship within a growth ecosystem.
The lessons I learned while designing Pixlr's wide range of products equipped me for the next step in my experience - working on a highly engaged team on a small deeply passionate company making more professional software while still focusing on creatives.