WYNNE CHAN

Design Leader

In what can only be described as a testament to the enduring human capacity for self-importance, I have managed to convince several reputable organizations to let me loose upon their digital products. Armed with an almost pathological need to make things "user-friendly" and an extensive collection of black turtlenecks, I lead design teams through the labyrinthine process of turning business requirements into something that won't make people throw their phones across the room.

My leadership focus is on shaping product strategy and coaching teams, though I occasionally roll up my sleeves to keep my design skills sharp (and to remind myself why we need so many variants in our component library). I've developed a particular talent for translating between the distinct vocabularies of Product, Engineering, Marketing, and Design, finding the common ground where business goals meet user needs and technical possibilities.

I guide design managers through the art of scaling their teams while preventing burnout, and mentor designers in their journey from pixel-perfectionists to strategic leaders. Through some miracle, I've managed to maintain the precarious balance between business metrics and human needs, all while preventing the complete collapse of cross-functional relationships when Engineering asks why we need "so much whitespace."

What follows is a journey of my experiences.

EXPERIENCE

Principal
Studio Chan, 2024 - Present

Head of Product
Kumospace, 2022 - 2024

VP of Product Design
Paperless Post, 2013 - 2022

Product Lead
Sonar, 2011 - 2013

Product Designer
LimeWire, 2009 - 2010

Web Designer
Songkick, 2007 - 2008

Designer
Getty Images, 2007

Designer
WireImages, 2005 - 2007

TALKS

01
Product Design (2019)
The Product School

02
Design Process (2019)
Columbia Business School

03
Design Driven: A Conversation with Product Designers (2014)

CONTACT

Gmail

mswynnechan

Instagram

@wynnechan

LinkedIn

wynnechan

Kumospace, 2024

In a desperate attempt to salvage human connection during the Great Webcam Awakening of 2020, our team embarked on a quixotic mission to reinvent the video call - a challenge roughly equivalent to teaching cats to respect personal boundaries. The result was Kumospace, a virtual platform where digital avatars could wander through pixelated rooms, finally answering the age-old question: "What if Zoom was more like The Sims?"

I led a band of designers and product managers through the uncharted territories of virtual office design, where success was measured by how many people forgot they were staring at screens all day. Our research revealed groundbreaking insights, such as the discovery that humans prefer not to be on camea all day. Armed with this revelation and an endless supply of metrics that somehow justified our existence, I crafted quarterly strategies that promised to revolutionize remote work, or at least make it slightly less soul-crushing. Through some combination of data-driven design and collective Stockholm syndrome, we managed to convince actual humans that this was, indeed, the future of gathering - or at least better than another hour in a traditional video call.

Whiteboarding in a Virtual Office, 2024
Kumospace
Product Design, Anthony Zhang
Product Design, Colin Pinegar
3D Art, Alan Lee
Animation, Sinan Buyukbas
Strategy and Direction, Wynne Chan

Recording Meetings in a Virtual Office, 2024
Kumospace
Product Design, Anthony Zhang
Product Design, Colin Pinegar
3D Art, Alan Lee
Animation, Sinan Buyukbas
Strategy and Direction, Wynne Chan

Wedding Landing Page (+4% AOV), 2018
Paperless Post
Product Design, Marissa Christy
Product Design, Tami Churns
Strategy and Direction, Wynne Chan

Paperless Post, 2013-2022

Paperless Post emerged in 2009 as our civilization's most determined effort to digitize the art of sending fancy paper through the mail, becoming a platform where people could spend hours agonizing over font choices for birthday party invitations. Through partnerships with luxury designers like Oscar de la Renta and Vera Wang, the company elevated the humble e-vite into something that could make your mother almost as proud as a real paper invitation, while saving just enough trees to ease the guilt of your weekly Amazon Prime deliveries.

As the designated shepherd of digital party planning, I led a team of designers through the existential challenge of making event management feel less like herding cats in cyberspace. My days were spent mentoring designers in the fine art of streamlining shopping carts and coaching them through the philosophical quandary of how to make creating an event feel seamless enough that hosts would forget they're basically running a small digital marketing campaign for their dinner party. Through some miracle of modern technology and sheer determination, we managed to convince millions of users that digitally managing their social events was better than email threads, all while maintaining that every pixel must spark joy in a world where hosts just want to know who opened the invite.

Product Listing Page (+2.1% AOV), 2019
Paperless Post
Product Design, Marissa Christy
Strategy and Direction, Wynne Chan

Flyer by Paperless Post

Somewhere between a Save-the-Date and a group text, Paperless Post launched Flyer - a product for those who found the act of selecting virtual envelope liners to be unnecessarily demanding of their emotional bandwidth. Here, finally, was a solution for people who wanted to invite friends to their housewarming party without triggering an existential debate about serif font choices or causing their mother to question their commitment to social graces.

Flyer emerged as the cool younger sibling who showed up to family dinner in jeans. The product was designed to be as flexible as your friend who says "I'm down for whatever" but actually means it - casual enough for impromptu happy hours, yet capable of scaling up for events where you might actually want to wear real pants. In a bold departure from tradition, we created a framework that valued functional simplicity over the number of ways you could digitally emboss your initials, while still maintaining enough customization options to prevent total anarchy in the event-planning world. The result was a mobile-friendly platform that answered the age-old question: "What if sending invitations was actually, dare we say it, fun?"

Flyer, 2019
Paperless Post
Product Design, Yoshi Uemura
Product Design, Spencer Harrison
Art Direction, Cat Chi
Strategy and Direction, Wynne Chan

Early Career, 2005-2013

Every aspiring designer must undergo a sacred rite of passage: the period of insufferable obsession with kerning. For me, this manifested as countless hours spent adjusting letter-spacing by single pixels while muttering about rivers to increasingly concerned roommates. Like a monk transcribing ancient texts, I dedicated myself to the study of typography, though my manuscripts consisted mainly of passionate AIM messages about why Gotham will dominate the next decade typed in a carefully selected shade of coal.

Not content with merely torturing myself over font choices, I decided to embrace the full spectrum of design masochism by teaching myself to code. This dual pursuit of aesthetic perfection and technical competence turned me into that peculiar creature who could spend hours designing grid systems and then obsessing over their implementation. As I emerged from this fever dream of self-imposed learning, I had somehow transformed into what the industry likes to call a "well-rounded designer" - a euphemism for someone who has strong opinions about both visual design and semantic markup. This questionable journey of obsession would later prove surprisingly useful in leadership, where the ability to speak both designer and developer helped bridge the eternal gap between aesthetic vision and technical reality.

People Nearby, 2012
Sonar
Product Design, Wynne Chan

Sonar, 2012
Picture a time when tech entrepreneurs, riding high on four cups of Blue Bottle coffee and the success of Foursquare, collectively decided that what humanity really needed was to be notified every time a stranger with similar Facebook interests walked by. Armed with venture capital and the unshakeable belief that people were desperately seeking ways to meet strangers through their phones (because making eye contact in real life was so 2006), we joined the ranks of startups trying to crack the code of "ambient social networking." The premise was simple: your phone would helpfully alert you when someone who once attended the same concert as you was nearby, presumably leading to spontaneous meetings that definitely wouldn't be awkward at all. But much like a contestant on The Bachelor, we soon discovered that finding the right match was harder than expected - users, it turned out, had some rather old-fashioned concerns about broadcasting their location to the world 24/7, and their phones' batteries shared similar reservations.

FPO Section Type designs to come

Figure 1:

Figure 2:

Collections of Places, 2011
Tracks.io
Product Design, Wynne Chan

Tracks.io, 2011
Tracks.io emerged in the golden age of location-based apps, when Silicon Alley was convinced that the future of human civilization depended on knowing exactly what was happening within a 10-foot radius at all times. Armed with the infectious enthusiasm that only venture capital can buy, we set out to solve the ancient human question: "What if you could see the world through the eyes of strangers?"

Track, 2011
Tracks.io
Product Design, Wynne Chan

Grapevine Logo, 2010
LimeWire
Brand Design, Wynne Chan

Grapevine by LimeWire, 2010

In an ambitious pivot, LimeWire evolved from its peer-to-peer roots to reimagine itself as a legitimate digital music service. The company developed Grapevine, a new streaming platform that aimed to transform the familiar LimeWire brand into a modern music discovery experience. These Grapevine mockups represent a fascinating moment in tech history: when a well-known file-sharing platform attempted to reinvent itself for the emerging streaming era.

Grapevine Mock-ups, 2010
LimeWire
Product Design, Wynne Chan

Grapevine Moodboard, 2010
LimeWire
Brand Design, Wynne Chan

Release Party Invitation, 2009
LimeWire
Graphic Design, Wynne Chan

LimeWire, 2009
LimeWire defined an era of digital music sharing, becoming the go-to platform for a generation discovering the possibilities of peer-to-peer networks. At its peak, the software connected an astonishing 18.6% of the world's computer users in what became history's largest digital music exchange - a time when song collections grew mysteriously overnight and playlists were built through collective contribution rather than curation. The story concluded in 2010 with a landmark $105 million settlement with the RIAA, marking the end of an unforgettable chapter in internet history that helped shape how we think about music distribution today.

2000’s Skeumorphism, 2009
LimeWire
Experience Design, Wynne Chan

Wynne Chan ©

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Portfolio writing developed in collaboration with Claude from Anthropic