Mitch Millsaps
Software designer based in Denver, CO.
Side projects
Refining my canvas for work after 12 years of iteration.
Before grabbing my headlamp to toil in the design mines I set 3 priorities: flexibility, maintenance, efficiency. I asked myself these questions:
The conclusion I arrived to was, in essence, a feed. A timeline of work and some brief context - simple as that. Good design seems obvious in hindsight so hopefully that's a good sign.
With this format I can easily try out new compositions and techniques while showcasing the latest and greatest work. All without cumbersome overhead. Read in-depth or scroll away, whatever your heart desires.
I've been on a declutter spree for the better part of 2 years now and during the process thought of this which would help me keep track of and take action on things cluttering my house and my mind.
The redesigned order form for user store items is now live! Really glad this one is finally out as our old design was dated and struggling to scale with all the permutations. More features coming soon. Benefit icons by Gustavo Zambelli.
The Product Design team at Sticker Mule is dispersed across timezones, continents, and projects. We work in soft silos: designers are predominant contributors to focus areas but others may jump in when the primary contributor is at capacity. To manage this, I established master files where we document design language and behavior per given focus.
The first iteration of master files I created is around a year old. The mistakes I made there gave me some key insight on keeping it manageable in this second iteration. We have at least 1.5-2 focus areas per designer so to make it manageable and keep a common thread designers now create and maintain master files for their given focus(es).
I've launched a new space on the interwebs to go on tirades about design. I'm not sure if it's a blog, a journal, or something else entirely but the writings will be entertaining and full of bizarre metaphors I can assure you that.
Today marks the release of briefed.design 2.0. I've done some major overhauls to the design language, branding, and especially SEO plus a few new handwritten briefs. More on the way soon!
Got to work on some concepts for a new home page after the dashboard designs. Not sure if they'll make it to production yet but something to give us a moodboard to build from at the least.
Updated designs to improve the thumbnails, information architecture, and flexibility of our marketplace of user stores. Looking forward to seeing them live.
An updated dashboard for Sticker Mule users to centralize shop management with a slew of upcoming features. Comes in light and dark mode.
Finally got buy-in after starting this in my spare time. We even posted it to ourTwitter with a video I made for it (hype version here).
We've been adding so many features so fast that it's been getting a bit hard to manage for us and users. It was a long process to get there but I'm happy with how it turned out and look forward to seeing it live.
Search is finally a feature on Sticker Mule after 15 years without it (literally). Thankfully we've compensated by making it extremely powerful. I got to design the full roadmap for it being totally site-wide for our custom products, tools, help center, stores and more.
Snippet of some fun illustrations I got to make for updates to Sticker Mule account settings. Enjoyed honing this style and pushing myself to make them beautiful and fun.
This ended up in development hell for a while but it's out now. Joint effort with Susana Gonzalez.
We've updated our artwork upload UX to be far more flexible in preparation for more advanced options coming to existing products plus some new ones on the way 👀
Paired up with Nicolás Higa to make this the best it can be.
Sticker Mule has three separate earnings programs where customers can make money via referrals, commissions, and their online stores. They're all somewhat interconnected but with varying legal requirements that were causing unnecessary frustration.
The roadmap we established to alleviate this was two-fold: 1. Create a flexible, transparent UX that can react to permutations & 2. Consolidate all three programs under one umbrella to simplify all around. Step 1 is out now.
With 7 designers on the Product Team now and all of us working asynchronously I had to figure out something to keep everybody up-to-date with the rapid pace we work at. If devs can have changelogs why can't designers? That was my thought at least.
The changelog has been up for a while now and it's really helped the team keep tabs on efforts and have a common reference point.
Quick idea I had for an onboarding process with custom dual-ltone icons.
