Product UX/UI · Interaction Design · Design System
VistaCreate Colors Hub — turning colour from a blocker into a product.
VistaCreate is a design tool for people who aren't designers — small business owners who freeze the moment they have to choose colours. The brand's colour guidance was dry, static, educational content. I designed the Colors Hub: an interactive colour ecosystem where users discover combinations, build palettes and gain visual confidence — then get routed straight into templates to make something. I owned it end-to-end (wireframing, interaction, UI) and built it as a page-template system that scaled to dozens of colour and palette pages.
Context & Challenge
Colour is where non-designers freeze — and where the product could win them.
VistaCreate empowers small business owners to design for themselves — but colour is the first place they get stuck. The existing colour content was educational and static: useful in theory, dry in practice, and disconnected from actually making something. The opportunity: replace passive "how colour works" reading with an interactive tool that lets people explore combinations, build palettes, and feel confident enough to keep creating — turning a knowledge page into a product surface that drives engagement.
Audience & goal
The non-designer who wants to look designed.
Small business owners, solopreneurs and DIY marketers (social-media managers on a budget) — capable and motivated, no design training, no designer to call.
- No colour theory — what goes with what?
- Blank-canvas / infinite-choice paralysis
- No time, no budget for a designer
- Brand consistency across posts
- "What if it looks cheap or amateur?"
- "What if colours clash and I can't tell?"
- Getting stuck on colour → abandoning the design
- Remove the colour blocker with an easy, guided tool
- Carry that confidence into making (templates)
- Deepen engagement → active, and Pro, users
Competitor / benchmark scan
Everyone makes palettes — almost no one turns colour into a made design.
What I did — end-to-end
From a dry guide to a scalable interactive product.
I owned the Colors Hub end-to-end — wireframing and interaction logic (discover → build → save → make), UI styling (a high-end, editorial interface that still reads as a usable product tool), and a scalable page-template system (a reusable colour-page pattern — colour story + palettes + templates — plus a palette generator and a hex/colour-name reference). Crucially the hub isn't a dead end: from colour, users are guided straight into templates — the moment they actually start creating.
The pull-through — colour into creation
Colour never dead-ends — it opens the editor.
The colour page isn't a read-only guide — I embedded real editor UI (a dashboard-style surface) into it. A live template rendered in that page's exact colour sits on the page; click it and it opens in the editor, ready to edit. And a colour-matched template gallery lets users click a colour and land on similar-colour templates. Browsing colour turns straight into making — the conversion funnel that sets Colors Hub apart.
Selected screens & system
Explore → learn → make — scaled to a whole library.
The Colors landing (hub), a colour page (the core template — a colour's story + curated palettes + real templates using that colour), a palette generator, a colour-names & hex reference, responsive across desktop and mobile — and the page-template system rolled out to 50+ colour and palette pages.
Impact
No vanity metrics — but a real pull-through into the product.
No formal analytics were tracked on this surface, so I won't invent numbers. What I can show is honest and measurable in its own way: a scalable system of 50+ pages, a redesigned interaction model, and an observed, directional pull-through from Colors into Templates.
Pull-through into the product
The honest, observed result: a positive trend in users moving from Colors into Templates — the "make" step (directional; no formal metrics tracked).
DirectionalFrom passive to active
Replaced static colour content with an interactive tool users actually engage with.
Confidence as the lever
Lowered the biggest creative blocker — colour — keeping small businesses creating in VistaCreate.
A scalable surface
The colour-page template rolled out to 50+ pages — a reusable, editorial-grade SEO / top-of-funnel engine, all routing into templates.
What shipped