I previously worked as the Senior Founding Designer at Rill Data, a VC-backed startup company in San Francisco, CA. Rill is the world’s first fully managed cloud service for Apache Druid™, a powerful open source data store used by many Fortune 500 companies.

I was one of the the first employees at Rill. We were an early-stage company, so I was the only designer and worked closely with our CEO and Head of Product. I was responsible for our branding, marketing website, design system, and product design. All of this work helped paint a vision for our investors, driving over $12 million in VC funding en route to building a profitable product.

I joined Rill within its very first month. As such, my first priority was to quickly build out basic branding to use for our product and investment pitches. At the time, it was uncertain if this would become the permanent company branding.

To capture the above qualities, I decided to explore logos that reflect a data visualization with basic shapes and sharp edges. I eventually landed with the below design, which received great internal feedback.

At past companies, I experienced significant design debt first-hand. As various components and pages get built with one-off styling, it can feel like a never-ending design battle to get everything in a consistent style.

So with Rill, I decided to start off with a full design system and live strongly by it. Since leaving Rill, Sketch (and Figma as well) have both improved support for component variations which would allow further improvements to this system.

I built out the first version of Rill's marketing website using Webflow (the same tool I used to build this portfolio). The main goal was to ship something as quick as possible so that Rill Data presented as a truly legitimate company. This also enabled me to move forward with the main focus of my role; working on the actual product design.

At Rill, I worked on two web products: Control plane and Data modeler.

The Rill control plane was our cloud SaaS web offering of Apache Druid. It quickly became an easier-to-manage version of the actual Apache Druid open-source project. We extended upon some functionality, while also still allowing users to jump into the actual open-source "Druid Console" if they desired.

While the Rill control plane solved the primary customer desire to easier utilize Apache Druid, the process of getting data from other sources (both streams and data lakes) into Druid was another pain point. At the time, there was no viable solution for this data migration besides custom data engineering.