Building Brainfish
A look back at my first three and a half years as a product designer.
This isn’t a case study.
It’s a story about building my first startup, growing into a product designer, and everything I learned along the way.
This page is a reflection on my three and a half years at Brainfish. It isn’t about one feature or one launch. It’s about helping build a company from its earliest days, wearing more hats than I ever imagined, and slowly becoming the designer I always wanted to be.
🌱 Every startup has a beginning
December 2022
I joined Brainfish as the company’s first and only designer. At the time the team consisted of a founder, a CTO, and me.
I didn’t come from a traditional design background. I studied Chemical Engineering, taught myself design through books, YouTube, articles, and years of practice. Brainfish became the place where all of that learning finally met the real world.
Looking back, I don’t think I understood how much those next three and a half years would change me.
Caption: Every feature started somewhere.
🎨 Giving Brainfish a face
One of my earliest responsibilities wasn’t designing product screens. It was helping define what Brainfish should look and feel like.
Together we shaped the visual identity from the ground up: the logo, colors, typography, illustration style, website, and marketing assets. We wanted a brand that felt confident, modern, and a little different from the sea of generic SaaS products.
Field Note
Building a brand isn’t about making something beautiful. It’s about making something recognizable.
🤖 Designing AI experiences
The product evolved constantly, and so did my thinking.
When I joined Brainfish, AI products were rapidly changing. Every few months there was a new model, a new trend, or a new expectation from customers. Designing for AI meant constantly questioning assumptions instead of following established patterns.
One belief stayed with me throughout those years: AI didn’t have to look like a chatbot.
Instead of forcing every interaction into a conversation, we explored interfaces that felt like software first and AI second. Sometimes that meant cards, timelines, actions, forms, visual summaries, or contextual suggestions. The goal wasn’t to make AI feel magical. It was to make it genuinely useful.
The Widget
The widget became one of the projects I spent the most time on.
What started as a fairly traditional support widget slowly evolved into something much richer. Instead of simply answering questions, it became a place where customers could discover articles, complete actions, browse media, submit forms, and seamlessly transition to human support when needed.
Across multiple redesigns we rethought navigation, layouts, hierarchy, mobile interactions, and how answers should be presented. Looking back, the evolution of the widget mirrors my own evolution as a designer.
Intent & Actions
Intent & Actions went through several completely different concepts before we landed on the final experience.
The first version relied heavily on drag-and-drop interactions. While flexible, it introduced unnecessary complexity. The next iteration experimented with a wizard flow that guided users through setup. Eventually we realized the simplest solution was also the strongest: a single-page experience where everything was visible, editable, and easy to understand.
That project taught me an important lesson. Good design isn’t about adding interactions. It’s about removing them until only the essential ones remain.
Insights
Insights is probably the project I’m most proud of, even though it never shipped.
Traditional analytics tell you what happened. We wanted to go one step further and answer the next question: What should I do about it?
The concept combined AI-generated themes, unanswered questions, knowledge gaps, feature requests, trends, confidence scores, and suggested improvements into a single workspace. Instead of asking customers to interpret graphs, the product would identify problems and recommend actions.
Although the project never reached customers, it fundamentally changed how I think about product analytics.
Nudges
Not every feature becomes a success story, and I think that’s an important part of the journey.
Nudges explored proactive support by surfacing helpful messages before customers became frustrated. While the concept was promising, we learned that good timing and context mattered far more than simply displaying a message.
Some of my biggest lessons came from projects that didn’t fully meet expectations, and I’m just as proud to include those here because they shaped how I approach product design today.
🚀 Growing the product
Not every project deserves its own chapter.
Over three and a half years I designed dozens of features, improvements, experiments, and internal tools. Some were customer-facing launches, while others quietly improved workflows behind the scenes.
I worked on analytics, knowledge generation, article management, onboarding, health checks, search experiences, AI workflows, empty states, settings, notifications, dashboards, and countless small interactions that collectively shaped the product.
Looking back at this collection, what stands out isn’t any single feature. It’s the consistency of building, learning, shipping, gathering feedback, and doing it all again.
🧩 Building systems
As the product matured, consistency became just as important as shipping new features.
What started as a handful of reusable buttons slowly evolved into a complete design system. Over time I introduced typography scales, spacing rules, color tokens, reusable components, interaction patterns, illustrations, iconography, and documentation that helped keep the product cohesive.
Although it wasn’t implemented as a coded component library, it became a shared visual language for the entire team. Engineers could prototype ideas faster, new features felt familiar, and the product maintained a consistent identity as it grew.
🎪 Taking Brainfish into the real world
Brainfish wasn’t only experienced on screens.
As the company attended conferences across Australia and the United States, I had the opportunity to design booths, banners, apparel, printed material, and event experiences.
Watching the brand exist in physical spaces was one of the most rewarding moments of my time there.
✨ A gallery of favorites
Hundreds of screens.
Thousands of frames.
Here are a few that still make me smile.
❤️ Looking back
If I could go back and give my younger self one piece of advice, it would be to share work earlier.
Some of my best ideas came from conversations, not pixels.
Brainfish taught me far more than interface design. It taught me how startups move, how products evolve, how brands grow, and how great teams solve problems together.
There will be future designers who redesign these screens, replace components, change colors, and rethink experiences.
And I love that.
Because underneath all those future iterations, there will always be a small piece of the foundation that our tiny team built together.
3.5 years. Thousands of frames. Hundreds of screens. Dozens of features. One brand.
My first startup. And the place where I truly became a product designer.