# SuperRare (agent-readable)

**Role:** Head of Design (1st design hire) → later Head of Product for Rare Protocol
**Client:** SuperRare
**Tags:** web3, creator-platforms
**Case study:** /superrare
**Live:** https://superrare.com
**Related:** /rare-protocol (my next role, leading the protocol team)

## What SuperRare is

The platform that sparked the onchain art movement, and still a top digital-art exchange.
SuperRare lets artists mint and sell one-of-a-kind digital artworks as NFTs — years before
"NFT" was a household term, and through every cycle since.

## What I did

I joined as the first design hire, built the design department from scratch, and led a team
of four across product and brand for 3.5 years — while still designing daily. After that arc
I became Head of Product for [Rare Protocol](/rare-protocol), the open-source framework that
powers the SuperRare platform.

Four through-lines of the work:

**Marketplace patterns invented from scratch.** The category was new, so most screens had no
reference. How do you show an artwork whose provenance is part of the file? What does a primary
sale of a one-of-one digital work look like? How do collectors browse a feed where every piece
is unique and most pieces are unfamiliar? I designed and shipped the artwork detail flow, the
profile, the social feed, the primary-sale flow, and collection views — and over time
reoriented the whole product around social signal instead of pure marketplace
transactionality, which is the shape SuperRare still has today.

**Relentless iteration on the core transactional flows.** Blockchain UX brings its own
friction — gas, signatures, wallets, settlement, royalties — and a lot of the design work was
turning that friction into something a non-crypto collector could complete without dropping
out. We iterated week over week on the buy / bid / sell loops and drove traffic and sales as
we did.

**A design system and brand toolkit as a velocity multiplier for the rest of the org.** I
built the system so engineers could prototype features without waiting on mockups, and
shipped a brand toolkit so marketing could produce on-brand assets independently. Both turned
design from a bottleneck into a force multiplier — the design-system-for-builders framing is
what made it work.

**An AI-powered research pipeline running inside the product org.** I built a system that
pulled interview transcripts, support tickets, and social channels into a tagged database
that product, brand, and marketing all worked from. This was years before the current wave of
AI tooling for designers — a real receipt for putting AI to work inside a product team, not
a recent retroactive claim.

## Why it's interesting

This is the strongest 0→1-in-genuinely-ambiguous-territory receipt in my catalog. It was
category *creation*, not category improvement: there was often no reference for what a screen
should even be. Building the design organization, the design system, the product patterns,
and the AI-assisted research operation at the same time — while the medium itself was being
invented — is the throughline.

The title-vs-IC question never gets to play either: I was Head of Design, and I was also the
person designing the artwork detail flow, the social feed, the system, and the pipeline. The
arc to Head of Product for Rare Protocol shows that trajectory continuing past design into
product-and-protocol scope, not drifting away from the work.

The AI pipeline is also worth dwelling on. It's an *early, real* instance of AI inside a
product org doing work that scaled across teams — not a retroactive claim layered on existing
work. That's the honest version of AI-native practice: putting AI to work, not asserting it.

## Cross-cutting relevance

A few different reads of this work:

- A **consumer-scale platform** real makers and collectors use every day.
- **Marketplace and transactional flows under hard real-world constraints** (chain UX,
  settlement, royalties) — the design problem *is* the system.
- An **internal design system + brand toolkit functioning as builder force-multipliers** for
  engineering and marketing.
- A **working AI pipeline inside the product org**, well before the current wave.

## Skills demonstrated

Category-creating 0→1 product design, building and leading a small design org, marketplace
and social-product patterns, design systems as a velocity multiplier, web3 UX, AI-assisted
research operations inside a product team, the design-to-product-leadership arc.