Matching the rapid pace of a startup

I’m the sole designer of the Brand and Marketing team, and it's not always easy. Delivery times are usually short and there’s not a lot of time to allocate to the process. But there’s another side to it: I’m able to trust my gut and have a lot of autonomy, responsibility, decision-making power, and freedom to experiment. This makes success feel more gratifying because it’s the consequence of trusting your intuition.

Creative freedom without learning to code

I started using Readymag almost 3 years ago when I was looking for an easy way to build my first portfolio site. Customization options on other tools were limited to non-existent. I was looking for something that would allow me to have more creative freedom and express my voice as a design professional without the need to learn how to code a website. I found Readymag to be the perfect solution for this.

I loved how easy and intuitive Readymag felt from my first interaction with the tool.

Now I use Readymag for long editorial publications at Hiro, such as this case study. Here we wanted to highlight a special edition of one of our blog posts that had one of our customers as a guest. Because the content featured so many code snippets, we wanted to do something that wouldn’t just seem super technical, but that would have some storytelling linked to it as well and avoid a simple article with thousands of lines of code. The visual style of the page was a reference to the most famous NFTs sold on Stacks, since the featured customer was previously an NFT marketplace.

About Hiro:

Hiro is the company behind the developer tools that bring Web3 to Bitcoin. Hiro's tools unlock the full potential of Bitcoin, enabling developers and entrepreneurs to build smart contracts, digital assets, & dApps that inherit Bitcoin’s security.

From zero to Hiro

Another example of such a project was “From zero to Hiro” which was a marketing campaign celebrating a year of achievements. Its primary goal was to show customer love. We wanted to convey in a single source all the different achievements of the Stacks ecosystem in its first year of existence featuring the impact that Hiro had on these achievements while building storytelling around it in a way that was visually compelling. The target audience was the Stacks community. We wanted them to feel proud of all these accomplishments, and to inspire other developers to bring their ideas to life.

This was a special one-off project, so we wanted something that would stand out from our regular brand.

As with everything we do, this was catered to developers, so I wanted something that would look tech-native (like the pixelated font), but mixed with something more contemporary like grainy gradients. This was also a project that featured accomplishments from other companies, so the use of strokes and neutral colors for backgrounds was deliberate so as to not to clash with other brand identities, and the combination with the purple/blue color palette was a reference to the Stacks ecosystem.

From idea to production in 7 days

This website was created in only one week from initial idea to launch, so the design process was dynamic and unstructured. I started with the first visual concepts that would serve as the foundation for the site.

Then I quickly moved to Readymag, where I built the structure and content layout. Once I had the layout of the site ready, I went back to work on the visuals and illustrations that would enhance the different sections.

The last step was to refine the interactions, hover effects, and animations on the site, which gave the landing page that nice storytelling pace.

The site received more than 8,500 views. By doing it with Readymag, I could focus more on actually designing and experimenting, instead of spending lots of time learning how to use the tool.