Back in 2015, I wrote about how we designed and implemented a system for naming and organizing our files in our company’s Dropbox account. It worked well for the last 2 ½ years. However, our approach started to break because we underwent some big changes in the middle of last year. The team was hard at work researching, building and launching our newest subscription-based product for pro designers, and we just launched it last week! Make sure to check out Creative Market Pro!

So, it was time re-evaluate our approach. After we saw Dropbox change the way shared links work…

One of the most difficult things about being a designer is trying to keep on top of the rapid changes in our industry. Tools, process, skills, team structure, and more are evolving at an ever-increasing pace. It’s difficult to know where to look and how much time to spend keeping tabs on all of the things. I’d like to think I’m not the only one experiencing this dynamic.

So, I started an initiative last summer to solve this. I decided to:

• Dedicate time each week to gathering and reading quality articles
• Share the best of what I found each week…

Crouching Feedback, Hidden Disaster

Feedback is the wild card in your team’s design cycles. Get it wrong and projects are at risk of being delayed, producing ineffective outcomes, or even worse — blowing up or shutting down. On the other hand, effective design feedback can save the day and bond the team together.

Creating a safe environment for the exchange of effective feedback and teaching everyone how to give it is one of a design team’s most important tasks. Since the rest of the company probably didn’t learn how to critique work in design school, helping everyone learn this skill is critical. …

I’ve been working on Creative Market for 5 years now. Where did the time go? I thought it was finally time for us to shape our design principles and design team’s mission and vision. Surely after this much time we should have these strategic pieces in place, right?

I decided that we shape our design principles first. I hoped that they could make it easier to craft our design team’s vision and mission afterwards. I began this strategic project like most others by combining external education and internal context. I went digging online to learn about what design principles are…

As a design manager, I spend a good chunk of time finding and recruiting new talent to join our design team. With so many talented folks available to talk to, it can hard to find the best fit that matches the needs of our product teams and aligns with our unique culture at Creative Market.

Recently, it took me six months to find and hire a great product designer to join our conversion product team. As her start date approached, I went digging for the onboarding document that I had used in the past. I was disappointed by what I…

Last month, I wrote about how our team started raising the bar of our user experience design efforts over the last two years. From those efforts, we identified and shaped a new UX design deliverable that’s become core to our process—the UX Plan.

This week, our lead senior product designer, Noah Stokes, posted an article about UX Plans called How I Design with Dropbox Paper or How the UX Plan was Born. It captures what the UX Plan is, why we created it, and how it’s helped us improve our process, collaboration, and user experience work in our product design.

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Since shipping the MVP over four years ago, the Creative Market team has been building new features and iterating on existing ones. We started off as a small, scrappy team that built product with tremendous speed. As we grew, we introduced cross-functional product teams and agile thinking to stay as nimble as possible.

Yet, it became clear that we weren’t hitting the mark with our user experience design efforts. Our product teams would discover additional user dynamics and nuances that weren’t considered too late in the project cycle. …

Early in my design career, I hoarded design tools and assets by the truckload. Before I was competent enough to make beautiful bézier curves in Illustrator, I would tap this personal archive of resources for what I needed. I’d edit these paid and free assets for the project at hand, and if I didn’t already have what I needed, I would source images from Google search and trace over them. In a sense, that’s how I got started in the field of digital resource design. It was a rough start.

Since then, I’ve found that there are easy shortcuts into…