Sage
End-to-end brand and product design for a YCombinator-backed gaming app — shipped in four months in a scrappy, fast-moving startup environment.
The project
Sage was a mobile app built by Eternal, a YCombinator-backed startup, to connect League of Legends players with pro gamers, streamers, and coaches — either for one-on-one coaching sessions or just to play together. The product shipped. It didn't survive long-term, but not for lack of execution — the market simply wasn't ready. For the founders, it served as a launchpad for their next idea. For me, it was the first YCombinator startup I worked for, and it opened a lot of doors.
My role
Sole designer across the full product: brand identity, UI/UX, motion design, iconography, and advertising creative. In a lean startup environment that's not unusual — you wear a lot of hats and you move fast. I communicated closely with the founder and engineering throughout, but I was the authority on all design-related decisions. The vision was mine to define and execute.
The challenge
Two things required me to get up to speed quickly: Flutter, which I hadn't worked with before, and League of Legends culture, which I wasn't deeply embedded in. Neither caused notable friction — engineering and I had a good working rapport — but the Flutter unfamiliarity did affect my confidence in scoping certain design decisions early on. The bigger challenge was doing all of this at startup pace, where the brand identity was still evolving and priorities could shift with little notice.
What I did
Three sprints, three different inputs
The redesign unfolded across three sprints, each informed by a different source. The first was driven by my own design judgment — I onboarded to an existing product and identified what needed to change to make it credible and polished. The second was shaped by user research interviews conducted by the founder and myself, combined with in-app metrics. The third was a final iteration on those findings, supplemented by market research into the visual language and branding that resonates most with our target demographic. The progression — gut, then data, then market — gave each sprint a clear rationale and kept the work from feeling arbitrary.
{{ph-sg-iteration}}
Proposing pivots, not just executing briefs
The thing I'm most proud of on Sage isn't any single design decision — it's the proactivity. I consistently proposed direction rather than waiting to be briefed on it. When something wasn't working, I flagged it and brought an alternative. Another designer might have stayed in their lane or suggested outsourcing certain aspects. I had a vision for what the product could be and I wanted to see it realised properly.
Meeting the audience where they are
For the advertising creative, I made a deliberate call to step away from conventional channels and approaches. League of Legends players in 2020 had a low tolerance for polished, corporate-feeling ads — they could smell inauthenticity from a mile away. I proposed Reddit as our primary advertising platform rather than Facebook or Instagram, at a time when that wasn't the obvious choice, and developed creative that spoke the visual and cultural language of the community: meme-aware, culturally fluent, and direct.
Designing for a platform I was learning in real time
Working in Flutter for the first time meant building a tighter feedback loop with engineering than I might otherwise have needed. Rather than treating that as a limitation, I leaned into it — clearer briefs, earlier check-ins, more explicit documentation of design intent. It made the handoff process more rigorous than it might have been on a more familiar platform.
The result
Sage shipped. The marketing approach landed with the target audience and contributed to early traction. The product ultimately didn't find the market it needed to sustain itself — but it was executed well within its lifespan, and the foundation it built informed everything Eternal did next.
Looking back
Sage taught me that a scrappy environment isn't an excuse for low standards — it's a reason to be more decisive. When there's no room to deliberate endlessly, the quality of your judgment matters more than the quantity of your process. I came in, got up to speed on an unfamiliar platform and an unfamiliar culture, and shipped something I was proud of. That's the job.
Want to see the full process?
Research findings, wireframes, user testing results, and complete design iterations are available to hiring managers and design leads.
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