New look. Real results.
My Role
Lead UX/UI Designer
Platform(s)
Web (desktop & mobile app)
Timeline
Jun 2022 – Dec 2023
Team
1 Designers, 2 Developers
TL;DR
Responsibilities
Led UX and visual design across a full site redesign, ad campaign, and SEO strategy for Start Studio.
Results
72.84% increase in impressions. 20.65% increase in clicks. A website that finally matches the brand.
Highlights
Three design rounds to nail the site. Four ads built for Facebook and Google. One SEO angle nobody else was targeting yet.
Problem & Constraints
Start Studio's website had aged out. The design no longer reflected the quality of the work, and with no active ad presence, the brand wasn't reaching new clients. The timing made it more urgent than a typical refresh: AI design tools were gaining real traction with the exact founders Start Studio wanted as clients, and a studio built to help startups design their apps needed to make the strongest possible case for why a human team was still worth hiring.
The ask was straightforward: modernize the site and launch a campaign that actually performs. The real challenge was doing both in parallel without letting either one feel rushed, at a moment when the case for hiring a design studio at all was getting harder to make.
Process & Key decisions
Good work rarely happens in a straight line. This project required moving between brand strategy, visual design, and campaign thinking simultaneously, staying decisive at each turn.
Website Redesign
Three full rounds of design. Each round sharpened the direction, but the biggest unlock was the copy. After several iterations, "Turn your idea into reality" landed as the hero line. Simple, confident, and exactly what the audience needed to hear.
Ad Campaign
Four ad concepts developed across Facebook and Google. Each one had to pull weight on its own while staying cohesive as a set. The designs were built to stop the scroll, not decorate it.
SEO Strategy
Midway through the project, I identified a gap worth owning: designers and developers searching for help fixing broken AI-generated work. I led a targeted SEO campaign around that specific pain point. It was a timely, underserved audience and the numbers backed it up.
Design System & Components
There was no documented system before this project, just a set of pages that had drifted from the brand over several years. I locked a small type scale early, one display face for headlines and one workhorse font for everything else, along with a spacing scale that carried from the website straight into the ad creative so a Facebook ad and a landing page looked like they came from the same company. Color got reduced to a primary palette plus one accent used only for calls to action, which meant every CTA across the site and the ads pulled the eye the same way. Locking these decisions in round one meant round two and three were about refining layout, not re-litigating what a heading should look like.
Final Experience
The finished site is clean, direct, and built around a single idea: Start Studio turns concepts into real products. The ad creative extends that message into paid channels with visuals that feel intentional, not templated. Everything from the hero down to the CTA is doing a job. Start Studio closed not long after launch, as its startup clients began turning to AI tools to design their own apps instead of hiring a studio. The timing lands harder in hindsight: the SEO strategy above was already targeting the people coming back to hire real designers after AI-generated work fell apart. The market moved fast in both directions at once, and Start Studio was standing in the middle of it.
"The irony wasn't lost on me. I was building an SEO strategy around people coming back from AI-generated work, while our own clients were leaving for exactly that reason. Looking back, I think the panic around AI replacing design work was sharper in late 2022 and 2023 than it turned out to be. A lot of founders who left for AI tools ended up needing a real designer anyway, which is basically the exact insight the SEO campaign was built on. We just felt it firsthand before the market caught up to it."
Impact & Findings
Search visibility jumped
The SEO campaign targeting AI-fix queries drove a 72.84% increase in impressions and a 20.65% increase in clicks.
Staying Organized
Building the site and the ad campaign at the same time let each one inform the other in ways a sequential process would have missed. The hero line that finally landed on the site, "Turn your idea into reality," became the spine of the ad copy too, so someone who clicked an ad and landed on the site heard the same promise twice instead of two different pitches stitched together after the fact.