Creative Fabrica: Marketplace, social, design system

Redesigned a high-scale creator marketplace and social platform to improve clarity, speed, and conversion through systemic design architecture.

 

Client

Creative Fabrica

Sector

Technology

Creative Marketplace

Social

Discipline

UX Design
Product Strategy
Brand Experience

Design Systems

 
 
 

Context

Creative Fabrica is a global marketplace and creator platform with millions of monthly users. I led end-to-end UX and UI work across Marketplace search and product flows, the Social product (“CF Fans”), and a new token-based design system used across multiple teams.

Challenge

The platform had grown quickly, creating visual inconsistency, duplicated patterns, and difficult navigation on mobile. Marketplace needed clearer hierarchy and more predictable purchase flows. Social required a cleaner publishing UX and better content discovery. Both products relied on legacy components that were slowing delivery.

My Role

As Lead UX Designer, I worked directly with the CEO, Chief Growth Officer, and Engineering team to lead Creative Fabrica’s marketplace and social projects

  • Lead UX and UI

  • Directed Marketplace, Social, and navigation redesigns

  • Built a multi-layer token system and patterns library

  • Worked directly with CEO, Growth, Engineering, and Data

  • High-fidelity prototypes for web and mobile

  • A/B test direction for conversion and engagement

 
 
 

Key Moves

This phase focused on transforming Creative Fabrica’s presence and integrating its API platform into a cohesive product ecosystem.

  • Rebuilt Marketplace hierarchy: I redesigned product cards, search results, filtering, and the item page to prioritise clarity and speed. This included typography restructuring, simplifying pricing signals, improving preview behaviour, and cleaning the Add to Cart and Download states.

  • Strengthened the mobile experience: Navigation and filtering were rebuilt to work cleanly at small breakpoints. Multi-step filters became a single predictable pattern, reducing friction and improving mobile browsing.

  • Redesigned Social (CF Fans) interfaces: I created simpler creator dashboards, a clearer publishing workflow, and a more consistent content layout. This surfaced the core value of the platform, improved scannability, and made content easier to browse and preview.

  • Introduced a scalable design system: I built a token-based system with colour primitives, semantic tokens, typography, spacing units, and component-level tokens. This enabled faster iteration, consistent visuals across Marketplace, Social, and Growth experiments, and a cleaner handover to engineering.

  • Improved Growth experimentation: I created modular layouts for homepage banners, modals, and subscription tests. Variants could be produced quickly using token changes rather than full redesigns.

Impact

The results strengthened Creative Fabrica’s position as a trusted creative infrastructure provider.

  • Increased Growth Experimentation Velocity by 40% due to the unified token system, directly leading to faster feature deployment.

  • Reduced Design-to-Development time by ~25% across all teams, leading to lower engineering overhead and less design debt.

  • Improved mobile conversion rates resulting from simplified navigation and filtering patterns.

  • A successful, unified token system adopted by 100% of engineering teams across Marketplace, Social, and B2B, ensuring long-term scalability.

  • Reduced user confusion and support load through improved visual consistency and predictable patterns.

Reflection

Clear structure and a unified system reduced noise across the product, allowing Marketplace and Social to evolve faster and focus on customer retention.