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 zero native design assets — no components, no visual system, no standards. Only a three-page brand guideline with legacy branding. The platform needed to feel credible, culturally familiar, and trustworthy to Black creators ranging from limited to moderate blockchain technology 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 only starting point was a three-page brand guideline. From that foundation every token, component, and standard was built from scratch. Five design principles governed every decision — ensuring the system was not just visually consistent but culturally accountable. Black was established as the primary brand anchor. Copper and gold were reserved for premium and verification moments. Work Sans was chosen as the typographic foundation — authoritative without being cold, scalable across every screen context. Ten type levels were documented in full: size, weight, letter spacing, and line height for every application.
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.
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