playground

role: Design direction, Visual design, Full-stack engineering
date: Mid 2025 to present, on and off
my part: I joined as a design advisor, took on much of the visual revamp, and built the AI curator from interface to backend integration.

overview

Playground is our internal site for designers to share work in progress. I came in to advise and ended up taking responsibility for much of the surface: the visual system, the landing page, and the AI curator.

A plain feed was not enough for the landing page. I added a curator voice that reads across the latest posts, names what people are exploring, and gives the room a point of view.

The curator had to come from the work instead of a stock blurb. I built the interface, backend path, and LLM integration so it could generate from the posts themselves.

I kept the surface quiet so the posted work could carry the energy. The site needed to feel cared for without competing with the experiments inside it.

The current Playground: landing page, work feed, post view, and sharing flow.

Playground feed titled Works on display, with posts including Item Check, a Cash App and Roblox clip, Buzz Memory Experiments, Lightning Lake sunglasses, a dashboard, and a proto container idea. — Work on display. Posts sit in a masonry of stills, clips, and writeups.

Post view. The work stays dominant; credits, tags, likes, and contributors sit beside it.