Chris Meisner
Product and UX design
Taking early ideas to something buildable, since 2010
I’m a product designer working with founders and early teams, across brand, UX and UI — what a product is for, how it works, and what it looks like. I usually start before the product is fully defined, and finish with a working prototype and an interface system the team builds from.
Selected work, newest first. Where there is a story worth telling — what was unresolved on arrival, the decisions and surfaces that were owned, and what existed at the end that did not exist at the start — it is behind “Read more”.
Founders Climb
2026–Product Design and Development · Founder
A one-person brand, product and experience studio for founders, sold by the week rather than by the project. Read more
Founders Climb
Product Design and Development · 2026–
- The challenge
- Building got cheap and fast, which moved the expensive mistake: not building slowly any more, but building the wrong thing quickly and calling it iteration. A founder can get almost anything made now — what stays theirs is the judgement about which thing to make, and it was being sold as a preamble to the real work rather than as the work.
- Owned
- All of it, being one person: the positioning and the name, the brand, the writing on every page, and the software the studio runs on — an application that carries an engagement from the question it opens on to the decision that closes it and the artifacts handed over.
- Outcome
- A studio that sells a week ending in a decision rather than a scope of work, live and taking clients. The application it runs on is in production, and engagements are run through it rather than through a folder of documents.
Miles
Brand and Product Designer · 2025-26
- The challenge
- Two founders with deep research, strategy and technical capability, and no product synthesis. Nothing was missing except a decision about what the thing actually was — which is the part neither of them could buy from an engineering shop.
- Owned
- Brand foundation through to a build-ready interface: positioning and user definition, typography, colour and image direction, the wordmark, the critical user path, a dynamic wireframe prototype running on real data, the branded dashboard, and the component set the team builds against.
- Outcome
- Five sprints and five refinement cycles between December and May. The founders left with a product thesis, a buildable core experience, and a brand and UI system they now extend themselves — the descent run without the studio in the room.
Product Designer · Freelancer
Working directly with the founders on flows and user-centred design — largely the work of turning genuinely complex information into something a person can read at a glance.
Citizen
2022–23Product Designer · Freelance
iOS design and prototyping for new product ideas — UX journeys and early concepts rather than maintenance of what had already shipped.
PickUp
Head of Product and Design · 2018–22
- The challenge
- Sports fans have an opinion about every headline and nowhere useful to put it. The conversation was scattered across group texts, feeds and comment sections — loud, unmeasured, and invisible to the media companies whose own content had started it. The bet was that the headline itself could be the question: answerable in one tap, wherever the fan already was, with no download and no signup form standing in front of it.
- Owned
- Co-founder and the only designer, so the brand, the product and the story investors read were all one job. The identity; the Pick itself, and the fan profile, points and rewards loop behind it; the embed publishers dropped into their own articles; the SMS flow that let someone play and get graded without installing anything; the marketing site; the fundraise deck. On a company whose whole proposition was low-barrier participation, where the friction went was the business model, not a detail of it.
- Outcome
- A platform that ran wherever the fan conversation already was — its own site, more than a hundred publishers, cable and OTT, and SMS. Topps gave memorabilia away through it in 2019; USA Today and its publisher network embedded the technology across 2020–21; Xfinity put it on the ten-foot experience for March Madness in 2021, where the SMS loop drove a 500%-plus lift in TV engagement. By mid-2021, backed by KB Partners, DRIVE by DraftKings and Connetic Ventures, it had reached 8.5 million people across 8,415 props and 688,084 picks, and a reader spent 1:55 on an article carrying a Pick against a 1:00 industry benchmark. It closed the following year: the distribution worked, the business under it never caught up. Four years as the founder rather than the designer a founder hires is the part that carried forward.
Buffy
Designer and Developer · 2018
- The challenge
- A new home page for a material nobody had heard of. The brand was largely settled and the assets were good, but the messaging, the photography and half a dozen stakeholders' priorities were all in separate places, and somebody had to hold them together long enough to become a page.
- Owned
- The organising as much as the designing: getting assets out of the photoshoot, settling content strategy and copy in wireframes before anything was styled, then designing in Sketch and building the prototype in Webflow at once — including scroll-driven background video, which the tooling of the day did not make easy.
- Outcome
- A solid v01 and a foundation to build on, handed to the full-time hire they brought in to take it further. Not the finished page either side pictured — worth saying plainly, because the useful thing that happened was the scaffolding, and handing over cleanly is part of the job.
Eater
2018Product Designer · Freelance
Art direction for Eater's restaurant recommendations — the screen where you say what you are looking for, and the card you land on once you have found it.
M13
2018Freelance designer
Branding, messaging and a clean mobile-first landing page built in Webflow, working directly with the founders.
Wyze
2018Contract product designer
iOS and connected-device flows — cleaning up and optimising user journeys on a product that already existed.
i.am+ / Omega
2018Brand and P · Freelance
Branding and new-product innovation on Omega — user journeys and market ideation alongside the founders.
Beme
2017Prototype designer, working close to the founders
Low-fidelity wireframes taken straight to a working prototype with the engineers in the room — a full-screen, Snapchat-shaped experience where posting a poll and answering one were the same act. Read more
Beme
Prototype designer, working close to the founders · 2017
- The challenge
- The company knew it wanted to build something around polls and did not yet know what. Everyone had an opinion about what came next — which was the problem, and also, this being early 2017, exactly the cultural moment the product was reaching for.
- Owned
- Pulling the team leads' competing ideas into one shape, then proving it: low-fidelity wireframes taken straight to a working prototype with the engineers in the room, plus the strategy conversation about what the technology could actually do.
- Outcome
- A full-screen, Snapchat-shaped experience where people posted a poll and answering was the price of taking part. It did not ship at that scope, and the reason was funding rather than the idea.
Learnvest / Northwestern Mutual
2016–17Contract designer
Concept flows and screens for large-format tablet dashboards a client and an advisor would use together, as the one outsider hired to show leadership something forward-looking. Read more
Learnvest / Northwestern Mutual
Contract designer · 2016–17
- The challenge
- The head of the design department needed to show the company's leadership something forward-looking, and had budget for exactly one outsider to bring energy the internal team could not spend on itself.
- Owned
- Concept flows and screens for large-format tablet dashboards a client and an advisor would use together — which meant learning how the business actually worked first, so the prototypes solved real problems rather than looking futuristic.
- Outcome
- Hypothetical screens a C-level audience could read, with genuine mechanics behind them — the thing you show to find out whether a direction is worth funding.
Dig Inn
2016Product Designer · Freelance via Playlab
Mobile screens for Dig Inn's ordering and checkout flow — the unglamorous business of getting someone through a purchase.
MTV
2016Product designer · Freelance
iOS and platform work inside corporate requirements — systems thinking, cross-team collaboration and new product ideation.
Wink / Quirky
Head of Product, Designer · 2013–15
- The challenge
- Quirky was inventing consumer products faster than any one of them could be designed for on its own, and Wink was the platform that had to make them behave like a single connected home. Every new device arrived needing to feel like part of something that already existed — which is a systems problem long before it is a screens problem.
- Owned
- The first designer on it, then the lead as the team was hired and grew — so the job changed from drawing the thing to making sure a growing team drew it the same way. Working directly with the founder on the platform's patterns rather than a fixed set of screens: how a device gets set up, paired, controlled and automated, so that the next product to arrive had somewhere to land instead of a new design.
- Outcome
- A connected-home platform that shipped, held its shape as new products kept arriving, and was later acquired — the design language outlasting the team that wrote it, which is the only outcome a platform is really for.
Freelance designer
The experience design for a new reading experience, alongside their strategist, on a title carrying strict corporate and advertising requirements. Read more
Condé Nast Traveller
Freelance designer · 2013
- The challenge
- A new reading experience for a title carrying strict corporate and advertising requirements — the pleasant version and the commercially mandated version had to be the same design.
- Owned
- The experience design, alongside their strategist.
- Outcome
- A reading experience that satisfied the requirements without reading like it had to.
Holstee
Freelance Branding · 2013
- The challenge
- A startup with a real mission and a good first product, and no mark to put on it. Whatever got made had to stand for who they were and still stamp cleanly across a wide, unpredictable range of products made with different artists.
- Owned
- The logo and wordmark, and the brand system around them.
- Outcome
- A mark that survived contact with everything they went on to put it on.
Area 17
Full-time designer · 2012
- The challenge
- Quartz arrived with an unusually good brief: a news experience built mobile-first on the web rather than as an app, for a reader who is moving and wants a lot of information quickly. Mobile-first was still novel, and the brief asked for it taken to its extreme.
- Owned
- The identity from a name and nothing else — wordmarks and logo treatments to pitch, across social, merchandise and the hero screens — then the interface itself, designed over a UX designer's wireframes with the brand laid onto it, and handed to The Atlantic's external development team to build in WordPress.
- Outcome
- It launched, and it is now read as a pivotal moment in mobile web — among the first to ship an infinite scroll.
Plated
2012Brand and Product Designer · Freelance
Branding and product for an early-stage startup — much of it the work of defining what the product was and how it should flow.
Gin Lane
2011Full-time designer
Digital experiences for progressive brands — ecommerce, startups and local New York businesses.
Red Antler
2010Designer · Full-Time
The agency's first hire, building brands and digital assets for startups, working with founders on both sides of the table.
Nooka
2010Designer · Intern · New York
A summer internship in midtown doing web and graphic work, directly alongside the founder.
The Art Institute of Phoenix
2007-10Student · BFA in Graphic Design · Phoenix, AZ
A BFA in graphic design, a student job at a one-man web shop, and an internship in midtown.