Overview
Candids
An event photo-sharing app that gathers every guest's photos into one gallery, designed as founding designer alongside two developers.
deliverables:
Product concept / user flows / AI-assisted prototypes / final UI / design system guidelines / Brand identity
my role
Founding product designer, partnering with two developers from concept to launch
this project shows
Turning a loose idea into a clear product model, mapping journeys for two different users, rapid prototyping with AI tools, and handing off a design system that developers could build and ship from.
what is candids
Candids is an event photo and video sharing app. At weddings, birthdays and parties, photos usually end up scattered across group chats. With Candids, guests upload from their browser through a shared link or QR code, with no app or account needed, and every photo lands in one shared gallery. Hosts can approve uploads, back up to Google Drive and download everything at once. Two developers came up with the idea and brought me on as their founding designer to shape the product, then built and launched it. Candids is live today.
how it works
Process
The founders' idea was simple: guests upload photos, and the couple manages them. The hard part was turning that idea into a product. I defined the core concepts (galleries, albums, uploads and approvals), what each one means to users, and what they can do with it. Then I mapped two journeys end to end. The guest's journey runs from opening a shared link to adding their photos. The couple's runs from setting up the event to sharing the finished gallery. To test ideas quickly, I built rapid prototypes with AI tools, starting with Gemini Canvas. From there, I designed the final UI in Figma and set up the design system guidelines, and the developers built and launched it.
Learning
AI is changing how products get built, and the biggest lesson for me was to stay open to new tools and try everything. As tools like Claude Code handle more of the build, polished mockups and rough wireframes matter less for a small team trying to ship. I learned to make something real first and refine it after, instead of working through every step in order. The work that mattered most wasn't the pixels. It was defining the concepts and journeys, and no tool could do that for us.
