CustomInk — UX Lead, Mobile-First E-Commerce & Design Lab
Role: Lead Architect
2013-2016
E-commerce & Custom Product Design
Mobile-First / Responsive
CustomInk is one of the largest custom apparel platforms in the US, serving individuals, schools, teams, and organizations. When I joined as Lead UX Architect, the team was building toward a responsive experience at a moment when designing across breakpoints was still a new discipline for most product teams. My work covered nearly every surface a customer touched — including the Design Lab at the center of it all.
The challenge
CustomInk's Design Lab — the flagship product at the center of the entire customer experience — had been built for a smaller desktop world. It was constrained to fixed, narrow screen dimensions and hadn't kept pace with how people were actually using the web. On large monitors it felt cramped. On phones, it barely functioned.
The surrounding experiences had the same problem. Home page, product catalog, group orders, fundraisers, accounts — the full customer journey assumed a desktop context that fewer and fewer users actually had.
The real opportunity was responsive design end to end: not just making things work on mobile, but rethinking how every surface — including the Lab itself — could scale gracefully from the largest monitor to the smallest phone screen.
Methods
My process began with understanding the full customer journey across device types — mapping where the experience broke down and where it had simply never been designed for the range of screens people were using. From there I worked surface by surface, starting with user flows and information architecture before moving into wireframes and interaction design.
My mobile design background was central to how I approached this work — but the bigger challenge was helping a team that had been designing for a fixed desktop context learn to think at every scale. I ran exercises with the team to expand their thinking in both directions: not just shrinking down to small screens, but opening up to large ones. What does this experience look like on a 32-inch monitor? What earns its place at every breakpoint? That shift changed how we made decisions at every stage. Instead of retrofitting responsive behavior at the end, we designed from the full range from the start.
For the living style guide, I worked directly with developers in a collaborative process — not handing off documentation but building it together. The goal was a shared artifact that both designers and developers would actually use and maintain, capturing component patterns, spacing standards, and interaction behaviors in a way that bridged design intent and technical implementation.
Surfaces I owned
Core Product
Design Lab
Discovery
Home page
Shopping
Product Catalog
Inspiration
Design ideas
Social Ordering
Group Orders
Giving Back
Fundraisers
Retention
Accounts
Design Systemt
Living Style Guide
Solution
The Design Lab was rebuilt to work beautifully at every breakpoint — from expansive widescreen monitors down to small phone screens. What had been a cramped, fixed-width tool became a workspace that actually took advantage of the screen it was on. This was the centerpiece of the project, and getting it right required both technical collaboration and a fundamental rethinking of how a complex creative tool could behave responsively.
I was the sole designer for every surrounding surface — home page, product catalog, design ideas, group orders, fundraisers, and accounts — each rebuilt with that same responsive discipline. The home page was restructured around clear entry points — get started, get inspired, get help — with a hierarchy that held at every size. Product catalog pages were rebuilt for browsability on touch devices, with filtering and sorting that didn't require hovering or precision clicking.
Group orders and fundraisers were two of the most complex flows — involving multiple users, asynchronous participation, and coordination across time. I designed these as guided, step-by-step experiences that reduced cognitive load and made the process feel manageable rather than overwhelming.
The living style guide became the connective tissue between design and engineering. Rather than a static document that goes out of date, it was a functional reference — a shared agreement on how the product should look and behave, built to evolve alongside the product itself.
The result was a cohesive, fully responsive experience across CustomInk's most-trafficked pages — anchored by a Design Lab that finally matched the ambition of the product, and a design system foundation that made future work faster and more consistent for the whole team.
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