Creative Fabrica
Stabilising and scaling UX across a high-growth marketplace at 30M+ users
Context
Creative Fabrica is a global digital marketplace serving 30M+ users, offering fonts, graphics, and creative assets to a broad audience of makers, designers, and businesses.
I joined during a period of rapid growth. Multiple teams were shipping at pace, growth initiatives were accelerating, and the product surface area was expanding quickly. The challenge was no longer finding opportunities — it was maintaining coherence, speed, and quality at scale.
I was embedded long-term to help the organisation absorb growth without slowing delivery or increasing risk.
Challenge
As the platform grew, several pressures emerged simultaneously:
Growth experimentation increased velocity but fragmented UX
Existing design foundations weren’t built to support long-term scale
Design and engineering needed tighter alignment to reduce rework
Decisions were becoming slower and riskier as complexity increased
The core challenge was to support rapid growth without accumulating UX debt, while creating systems that made teams faster rather than more constrained.
My Role
I operated as a senior UX and design systems lead, embedded over a two-year engagement with responsibility for stabilising foundations while supporting rapid growth.
My role spanned strategy through execution, working closely with:
Product and growth leadership
Engineering teams
Internal designers
The focus was not surface polish, but reducing mistakes, increasing delivery speed, and creating shared understanding across teams.
Key Moves
1. Establishing scalable design foundations
Designed and implemented a multi-layer design token architecture (primitives → semantic → component) to support consistency, theming, and future growth without slowing teams down.
This shifted the system from “design documentation” to shared, execution-ready infrastructure.
2. Aligning growth work with system integrity
Partnered closely with growth teams to ensure experimentation could move quickly without eroding trust or coherence.
The goal was not to slow experiments, but to create constraints that made fast work safer.
3. Creating shared language between design and engineering
Introduced clearer patterns, naming, and decision frameworks so teams could ship with fewer hand-offs, less ambiguity, and less rework.
This reduced decision fatigue and improved delivery confidence.
4. Raising baseline quality without reducing velocity
Focused on small, compounding improvements that lifted the overall experience while respecting real delivery constraints.
Quality increased without adding friction.
Impact
Fewer avoidable UX and product mistakes
Faster, safer experimentation for growth teams
Stronger alignment between product, design, and engineering
Design foundations able to support future scale and enterprise use cases
A calmer product organisation able to move with confidence
Reflection
At scale, good UX isn’t about individual screens — it’s about systems that let teams move fast without breaking trust.
If these are the kinds of problems you’re dealing with, this is the kind of work I do.
Crater Plato is based in Sheffield. Working with teams across the UK and internationally.