Designing and building eight client-facing apps in eighteen months at a fast-moving studio — and the toolkit that made that possible.
✦ Client
WeTheDevelopers (agency clients: CTCsafety, Apixall, Avaloncotyarn, Creationgulf, +4 others)
✦ Role
UX Designer → Junior UX Engineer
✦ Duration
1 year 7 months
✦ Platform
Responsive web · Hybrid mobile
✦ The shape of it
My first design role was at a studio shipping client apps on six-week cycles. To survive the cadence I built a small, stubborn toolkit — patterns, snippets, and questions — that let me design and front-end-build eight apps without losing the thread on any of them.
Problem
Agency design at this pace usually means either inconsistent work or thinly disguised templates. Clients ranged from a textile manufacturer to a workplace safety platform, and they all wanted to feel like the only project. We needed a way to give each one real attention without restarting from a blank Figma file every time.
What I did
A shared foundation — type scale, spacing, accessibility checklist, and a battery of stress-tested patterns — that let me start every project at 30% done and spend the time saved on the parts that actually mattered to that client. Engineering reused my front-end shells across projects, which cut handoff churn dramatically.
✦ Outcomes
+90%
DAU lift for the partner brand portfolio after redesign
8
apps shipped in 18 months without quality regressions
6 → 4 weeks
average design-to-build cycle by month nine
1
shared component library used across all clients
01 — Joining at the deep end
I started as an intern in late 2017, and within three months I was leading design on client work. The studio's posture was 'figure it out and ship it,' which was terrifying and also the fastest possible way to learn how products actually get built.
02 — The toolkit
By month four I had a private Notion of patterns I refused to redesign for every project: the empty state, the destructive-action confirmation, the onboarding skeleton. Each pattern had a 'why,' a sketch, and a snippet of HTML/CSS I could drop into any project. By month nine the dev team was using my snippets too.
The thesis: the boring parts should be boring. Save the design budget for the parts that are unique to this client's users.
03 — Selected client work
CTCsafety: a mobile-first incident logging app for industrial sites. Designed for use with gloves on a 6" Android phone in bright daylight — every interactive element met a generous touch target and contrast threshold.
Avaloncotyarn: a B2B catalog and order site for a textile manufacturer. We replaced a PDF-driven sales process with a real product browser; orders processed online tripled in six months.
Apixall: a partner integrations marketplace. The challenge was less visual and more architectural — designing a category system that scaled from twelve integrations to a hundred without becoming a sprawl.
04 — Front-end as a design tool
The thing that made this period formative was doing both sides. Designing a screen and then implementing it in HTML and CSS the same week sharpened my taste for what's worth fighting for in a mockup and what's a phantom problem the browser will solve for free. I still rely on this instinct.
05 — What I took with me
Three habits stuck. One: always ship something on day one of a project, even if it's a wireframe in Figma — momentum compounds. Two: treat the design system as a personal asset that travels with you, not a deliverable that lives at one company. Three: spend the first kickoff meeting listening, not pitching.
✦ Keep going