Overview
Company: Alchemy is a $10B crypto infrastructure start-up that powers 71% of top crypto apps. Notable customers include: Visa, Stripe, Robinhood, Polymarket, Uniswap, and World.
Industry: Crypto / Infrastructure
Tenure: 3 years
My Role: Lead designer. My role was spread across web, brand, and design systems; at times, I also covered product design for our developer dashboard.
Tools: Webflow, Figma, Dato CMS, Rive, Photoshop
AI Tools: Claude, Midjourney, Flora
Results
10x faster development cycles by creating & scaling our design system
30% faster site load times by migrating to a headless CMS
Elevated brand presence through strategic design leadership
Enabled org-wide self-service for brand assets
Improved dev experience & product adoption on Docs
Cultivated a collaborative design team culture
Special thanks: This was successful in large part due to the amazing team at Alchemy. While the projects I included reflect my work as an independent contributor, I'm a better designer today because of my design family: Ramiro Cardozo, Julia Dwyer, Adam Lukasik, and Yuxin Wu.
Challenge
When I joined as a contractor in mid-2022, the design team was operating without foundational infrastructure.
Every project was treated as a one-off effort—there was no design system to build from, no centralized brand asset library, and no consistency.
Simple tasks like launching a single landing page could take weeks and the team was in a constant reactive mode.
We needed design strategy: a scalable design system that could support rapid growth and fundamentally change how work got done.
Resolution
In early 2023, I joined full-time to build what we needed to scale.
I made the case for systems. Built buy-in for the design system and website migration. The results: page launches went from weeks to days. Load times dropped 30%. I launched design.alchemy.com as our brand hub, synced with Figma, connecting Product, Marketing, and Sales.
I directed brand design for major product launches, built Account Kit's full sub-brand from scratch, and rebuilt our documentation site to serve developers better and drive adoption.
When I reflect on my time at Alchemy, I remember our speed, systems, and story-telling.
Design System
I built our design system 0→1. No one told me to. I saw the long-term cost of not having one.
We were initially maintainig two separate UI libraries with duplicate tokens, forcing us to build every foundational element twice and fragmenting our design system across marketing and dashboard properties.
I restructured everything around three principles: centralized tokens, progressive inheritance, and contextual flexibility.
One Universal Library now feeds both properties. Teams inherit components directly or customize for their context. At the foundation: a single token system for color, spacing, and radii. Changes flow down automatically.
I got buy-in by weaving it into smaller projects first. Tested with concentrated groups. Built advocates. Once the impact was proven, management and developers came onboard.
I worked with frontend to ensure seamless implementation. We established shared naming conventions between Figma and code—button-primary-large matched across both. I created developer docs with code snippets, usage guidelines, and implementation notes for each component.
I leveraged Figma's advanced features for power and maintainability. Variables for color tokens and spacing made theme updates instant. Auto-layout patterns flexed across breakpoints. Component variants covered edge cases without creating sprawl.
To raise team adoption, I ran training sessions and created Loom videos for designers, engineers, and marketers. Within the first quarter: all of design, all of frontend, and a handful of marketers were actively using the system.
The impact: by Q2 the system powered 100% of new web pages and 50% of product UI. Designers spent far less time on repetitive work. We eliminated duplicate effort and built a foundation that scales.
This restructure became the catalyst for our website migration.
Brand Hub
I built and shipped design.alchemy.com to serve as our central brand resource.
Everything in one place, synced with Figma so it's always up to date.
Equipt with dynamic search, downloading brand assets has never been easier.
This was a major win in helping cross-team collaboration across Marketing, Sales, and Product.
A system is only as successful as its adoption rate, so I was thrilled to watch design.alchemy.com become sticky across teams.
Account Kit Launch
As the team grew, I stepped into a design leadership role—owning brand design across major product launches.
When we were gearing up to launch Account Kit, I had only a week and a half to:
Create a subbrand
Design and build its landing page
Design the social assets for launch day
All solo.
This was (admittedly) one of my most stressful weeks at Alchemy. But the team came together and met the deadline.
One of my favorite parts was designing our partnership social images for the Modular Account part of the launch. I made custom 3D graphics for each partner logo and composited them with our announcement.
They were each custom rendered in Blender. I think these moments of care and craft are critical, when today everything looks so similar.
For our blog posts, I took care to make sure they were branded and information dense diagrams were easy to digest.
For launch day, I got the company (across both SF/NY offices and remote!) to dress in our new pink/orange colors.
I think these types of initiatives really help the whole company feel connected to a new subbrand—especially for such an important product line.
Yes, I am the one in the pink cowboy hat and orange tutu.
Docs redesign
One of my last big projects at Alchemy was rebuilding our documentation site to better serve developers and drive adoption.
Our documentation was functional but outdated—it hadn't evolved alongside our product.
Developers struggled with navigation, visual hierarchy was weak, and the design felt disconnected from our brand.
Poor docs experience wasn't just an aesthetic problem; it was a barrier to product adoption.
The Challenge:
The existing docs site had several critical issues:
Navigation was overwhelming with no clear information hierarchy
Product info was not recent and visual styles did not match
Code examples were hard to scan and copy
Search functionality was inadequate for finding specific methods or use cases
Mobile experience was essentially broken
My Approach:
I started organizing a whiteboarding session for the working team to get a baseline of
Where we're at
Where we're looking to improve
I then interviewed developers (both internal and external) to understand their actual workflows.
What were they trying to accomplish?
Where did they get stuck?
Then I got to work on the improvements.
Navigation / Information architecture:
Restructured content into clear categories: Getting Started, API Reference, Guides, and SDKs
Created persistent left-nav with expandable sections
Implemented breadcrumbs for wayfinding in deep documentation
Visual Design:
Elevated typography with better hierarchy and readability
Designed a code block system with syntax highlighting and one-click copy
Built reusable doc components (callouts, warnings, tabs for multi-language examples)
Developer-Focused Features:
One-click copy buttons on every code block (seems obvious, but our old docs required manual selection)
Inline API response examples so developers could see what to expect before making calls
"Try it" interactive endpoints where developers could test API calls directly from docs
From there, I worked to get functional prototypes ready to get in front of customers. Then, the dev experience team took the prototypes and tested them with both Alchemy customers and devs in the space that don't use Alchemy.
We learned a lot of key information about how developers like to traverse docs via the sidebar navigation and iterated the most there.
Design decisions
I had to balance comprehensiveness with simplicity.
We had 400+ pages of documentation showing everything at once would be overwhelming.
I designed a progressive disclosure system: start with the most common paths, then reveal advanced options as needed.
For code examples, I advocated for showing full, working snippets rather than fragments. This meant longer code blocks, but user research showed developers preferred copy-paste-run examples over having to piece together multiple snippets.
While I left shortly after launch, early signals were promising:
Positive developer feedback in user testing sessions
Developers reported finding what they needed faster
Asset Generator
One big opportunity area was how to solve the bottleneck of never-ending, last-minute social image requests.
I decided to build my own tool: Asset Generator. This unlocked Marketing, generating dozens of on-brand variations in minutes rather than waiting days for designer availability.
Shipping velocity of on-brand social images increased significantly, allowing me to focus on strategic work instead.
Collaboration
Working at Alchemy taught me that the best design work happens through collaboration, not isolation.
I learned to:
Build trust with engineering teams by respecting technical constraints and pairing on implementation
Advocate for users while understanding business priorities
Create systems that empower teams rather than create dependencies on designers
Move fast without sacrificing quality
Lead through influence rather than authority
These projects succeeded because I worked alongside talented people who challenged my thinking and made the work better (and, honestly, with the AlchemyFam… more fun.)
