Brand, product UI, and growth design for PhotoBooker — Zenfolio's marketplace matching local photographers with their clients. Three years connecting brand and product as Visual Design Lead.
In 2018, Zenfolio — a 100,000+ photographer platform — started building a new marketplace product to connect those photographers with the clients looking to book them. The product became PhotoBooker: search a photographer by style, location, and schedule; review their portfolio and pricing; book and pay in one place.
A marketplace is really two products in one — one for the photographers, one for the clients — that have to feel like a single experience. Each side gets its own sign-up, its own pitch, its own marketing, but one shared brand and one shared product. Brand and product had to launch as one thing on day one.
Two distinct audiences, served by the same brand from the same surface. We named, mapped, and designed for them separately — then reconciled the experience into one product.
The core flow — search, filter, browse, book — was the same regardless of side. The way each side entered that flow was completely different.
As Visual Design Lead, I worked between marketing and product. Brand identity, voice and tone, logo concepts, brand guidelines, the UI for the marketplace itself, the landing pages, the campaign assets — all of it was one design problem. There was no version where we shipped the product and "figured out the brand later," and no version where we built the brand without the product behind it.
A marketplace has to launch as a brand and a product on day one. That made every design decision a brand decision and a product decision at the same time.Working between brand and product
The brand guidelines were written for the whole team to use — across product, marketing, social, blog, and tradeshow — so the same identity carried whether someone landed on the marketplace, opened an email, or saw an ad on Instagram. The product used the same language as everything else, so moving between them never felt like a jump to a different place.
Every marketplace has the same chicken-and-egg problem: photographers won't sign up if there are no clients, and clients won't book if there are no photographers. Zenfolio's existing base of 100,000+ photographers was the advantage — sign up as many of them as possible, then bring the clients in city by city.
I designed the work across every channel we used to reach both sides: spots inside the main Zenfolio app, regular email invites, dedicated landing pages, paid social and display ads, and ads tailored to each city as we rolled out. Every piece had to do two jobs at once — show the brand and bring in sign-ups — and we A/B tested for both.
Zenfolio and PhotoBooker have different brand identities, so on the Zenfolio-hosted landing pages I matched the PhotoBooker look and feel — so the marketplace never felt off-brand to someone arriving from the main app.
PhotoBooker rolled out alpha → beta → US-wide over 20 months. Beyond the product itself, it was my first long run connecting brand and product — designed together, across three years at Zenfolio.
