MADE is a blockchain-powered intellectual property registry built to protect Black creators — giving artists, designers, and cultural producers the tools to register, license, and monetize their work before it gets taken from them.
Challenge: A developer-built React prototype existed with no native design assets. No components, no scale, no usage standards. What existed was a legacy 2021 brand guideline: a manifesto, a logo, a color direction, and photography principles, with no design system to build a product on. The platform needed to feel credible, culturally familiar, and trustworthy to Black creators with limited to moderate blockchain literacy.
Outcomes:
Before a single component was built, the engagement began with a full discovery process. A creative brief was authored from scratch — defining personas, success metrics, milestone structure, and risk mitigation. Five design principles were established with the founding team, governing every decision that followed: cultural specificity, trust through transparency, accessibility as equity, creator-first hierarchy, and protection over promotion. The existing React prototype was audited using a structured component extraction methodology — identifying every UI element in the codebase and migrating it into Figma as the foundation for the new system.
The user journey map became the strategic backbone of every design decision on the project. A casual visitor with vague curiosity about cultural IP protection was mapped across five stages — Home Hero Entry, Home Value Prop, Listing Initial Browse, Listing Filtering, and Property Detail. The map documented goals, actions, thoughts, pain points, emotional states, touchpoints, and design opportunities at every stage. Two findings defined the entire UX strategy: the homepage language was too blockchain-heavy for the target audience, and the platform's cultural differentiation was invisible throughout the entire existing experience.
The journey map translated directly into design decisions. The homepage could not lead with blockchain — it had to lead with culture. The marketplace had to foreground creator identity, not product inventory. The property detail page had to build trust before asking for any action. Every screen was built from the system's documented components and tokens — no one-off decisions, no undocumented exceptions. The full product surface was designed end to end: homepage, listings, property detail, five-modal system, and checkout.
The starting point was a legacy 2021 brand guideline. It defined an identity, not a system: a logo, a type and color direction, and photography ethics, with almost no usage rules and no product specs. The color direction was the one asset worth carrying forward, and I systematized it into semantic tokens. Everything the product needed as a system, I authored: the typography scale, the component library, every state and variant, and the usage rules that govern them. The system was structured in three tiers, primitive values, semantic roles, and components, so no color, size, or state was ever decided twice.
The most technically abstract element of the platform — blockchain verification — needed to feel immediately legible to Black creators who had never used a blockchain product. Generic blockchain iconography was cold, angular, and culturally meaningless to the audience it was meant to serve. The question was not what icon to use. It was what symbol of permanence, protection, and unbreakable connection already existed inside hip hop culture. The answer was the Cuban link chain.
The brief disguised itself as a visual problem. I diagnosed it as a trust problem. A blockchain platform asking Black creators to register their life's work had to earn belief before it earned action, and the experience it inherited led with the one thing that created distance: the technology. Every decision in this system was built to reverse that order. Culture first, proof second, the ask last.
That sequence wasn't a preference. It came directly from the journey map, where abstract blockchain language was the first barrier a creator hit. The fix was not a nicer interface. I identified it as a different point of entry: lead with the people, make verification legible through a symbol the culture already trusts, and let the technology recede until it was earned. The blk Chain ID exists because protection had to feel familiar before it could feel safe.
This is how I work. I read what a brand is trying to become, diagnose the real problem underneath the stated one, and build the system that makes the right decision the only easy one to make. For MADE, that meant a product where cultural specificity is the strategy instead of a layer that sits on top of it.
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