Being the only designer at a blockchain company taught me things corporate never would
Kana Labs / XyraLabs · Solo design consultant
This was my second job ever. I walked into Kana Labs — later XyraLabs — as the only designer and inherited every design surface: brand, product UI, marketing, the design system, eventually the front-end code. No senior to copy. No peer to check me. It forced a way of working I'd now choose on purpose.
Find a better reviewer
The first real test was the Kana rebrand — exactly the work you want a room of designers to tear apart, and I had no room. So I went the other way: instead of design feedback, I collected reactions from non-designers and talked to actual users, the people who'd live with the brand, not critique it. It came out closer to them because of it. Design peers validate your taste; real users validate reality. Forced to skip the first, I leaned all the way into the second — and I'd recommend it even to teams with a design department to spare.
The days it all lands
The stress in a Web3 company isn't the design work, it's the timing. A campaign launch means the product UI has to actually work while the marketing pieces go live around it — same day, same hour, no slack. The Perps Mainnet launch is burned into my memory: product correctness on one screen, marketing assets on another, a deadline that didn't care there was only one of me. You learn to triage fast when you're the bottleneck for five things at once.
Turn repeated work into systems, or drown
Doing every kind of design surfaced the patterns — the same poster, layout, and fix over and over, the quiet repetitive work that eats a solo designer's week. So I stopped redoing it and started removing it: I built an internal tool for the marketing team to automate the repetitive output (the CollabPoster), and a real design system underneath the product so consistency held without me redrawing it every time. That system became the second designer I didn't have. Every hour you don't systematize is an hour you'll spend again next week.
What corporate wouldn't beat into me
Two things. Pivot and ship fast — roadmaps change weekly, the thing you designed Monday is reprioritized by Wednesday, so you stop treating any artifact as precious and treat shipping as the only real output. And make dense, intimidating data feel approachable — crypto interfaces are wall-to-wall numbers with real money behind them, and learning to make that calm and obvious for a beginner is the most transferable skill I've picked up.
If you're about to be the only designer somewhere
Don't wait for permission or a process — you are the process now. Get your feedback from the people who'll use the thing. Automate the work you're doing twice. Build the system before you think you need it. And when something lands outside your job description — the front-end, the internal tool, the brand call no one else will make — pick it up. Being solo isn't a smaller job. It's a wider one, and that's the best part.