Earlier Work · Visual Design

Visual design for an award-winning AI robotics product.

At Robolink I created marketing and engineering visual assets for Zumi — a self-driving educational robot that won CES 2019's Best of Innovation Award. My work supported a launch audience of 20,000+ students, educators, and CES attendees.

Role
Visual Designer
Timeline
2018 — 2019
Product
Zumi (CES 2019 Best of Innovation)
Audience
20,000+ students & educators
Robolink Zumi

What I did

I produced advertising and engineering visual assets, supported quick web design tasks, and designed the assets for Robolink's robotics competition events. The work spanned the gap between marketing-grade output (clean, on-brand, fast-turnaround) and engineering-grade output (technically accurate diagrams used internally to explain how Zumi worked).

Holiday ad campaigns — and learning to read the actual customer

I designed ad campaigns for Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas. Built each at the seven standard web-ad sizes so the marketing team could ship variants without re-cutting, and so we could A/B test which sizes performed best.

Web ad standard sizes
The seven standard sizes I built each campaign in.

My first Halloween ad underperformed. I'd assumed the customer was a kid fascinated by robots; the actual customer was a parent or educator buying for a kid. That mis-read was the most useful failure of the role — every subsequent campaign started with "who is actually clicking?" instead of "who does this look like?"

Previous Halloween ad I was given as reference My first Halloween ad — underperformed

Cyber Monday and Black Friday were the turn — same product, redesigned for parents and educators, with lifestyle imagery instead of clean product shots. A/B testing surfaced which framings actually converted.

Black Friday campaign ad Christmas campaign ad — best performing of the season

Sleeves for Zumi competition fields

For Zumi product launches we ran competitions where kids navigated their robots through a mock-up field — moving between buildings, recognizing stop signs, finding efficient routes. I designed printable canvas sleeves for the large lego blocks that turned the abstract field into a recognizable city. The catch: design 2D, print 2D, fold into 3D — so the layout had to account for folds and seams.

Canvas sleeves for Zumi competition lego blocks
2D-to-3D canvas sleeves for the competition field.

Course flyers for the learning center

Redesigned the course-info flyers Robolink sent out across the US.

Course flyer 1 Course flyer 2

Why I include this

Robolink is the project that established two habits I still use. First, shipping at speed inside someone else's brand — taking direction, producing on a tight timeline, getting feedback, iterating without ego. Second, designing across a fidelity gradient — the same product asset in a marketing render, a technical diagram, and a web component. Those instincts translated directly into the design-system thinking I rely on at Owaves and used at Scripps.

VP UX & Design Wesley Hsu Product Zumi (CES 2019 Best of Innovation)