ABOUT COMMONMARKER
CommonMarker was my own venture — a production management platform I founded, designed, and took to beta as the sole designer and product lead over nearly four years. I ran the full design process: from embedded field research on active film sets in Los Angeles, through information architecture, interaction design, and high-fidelity delivery. CommonMarker was selected for the Get Sh!t Done accelerator — a competitive program for female founders building scalable technology companies.
The platform was built for professional film and TV crews: a highly specialized, fast-moving industry that had never successfully moved away from paper. No existing design conventions existed. No design system to extend. No product lead to hand off to. Every decision was mine to make, validate, and live with.
MY ROLE
Founder and sole product designer across the full product lifecycle. I was responsible for every design decision from the first sketch to the final handoff for development.
Research: Contextual interviews and field observations with professional film crews across Greater Los Angeles — on active sets, in production offices, and during post-production. I learned the industry from the inside before drawing a single screen.
Design: Full UX strategy, information architecture, interaction design, and visual language. I designed for four distinct user roles — producers, directors, assistant directors, and crew members — each with unique permission levels, workflow needs, and information hierarchies. No existing design conventions existed for this problem space.
Delivery: Wireframes through high-fidelity prototypes, user testing coordination with film professionals, and complete design documentation for the development team.
Recognition: CommonMarker was selected for the Get Sh!t Done accelerator (Summer 2020 cohort) — a competitive program for female founders building scalable technology companies.
THE CHALLENGE
Film production runs on paper. Scripts, call sheets, shooting schedules, crew lists, daily reports — all printed, distributed by hand, and obsolete the moment anything changes. On a typical shooting day, things change constantly.
The deeper problem is communication. Breakdowns between departments haunt every production regardless of budget — from a three-person indie crew to a 300-person studio blockbuster. Crews work in remote locations and on closed studio stages with no reliable connectivity. The industry has stayed on Xerox copies and Excel spreadsheets not out of stubbornness but because every digital alternative has been too slow, too cloud-dependent, and too clunky to survive on set.
The design challenge: build something fast enough for people whose time costs thousands of dollars per hour, and simple enough to use in the middle of a shooting day with no training, no IT support, and no margin for error.
Design needs:
- Fast enough for a production that cannot stop
- Works offline or on low-bandwidth connections
- Surfaces only the right information for each role at the right time
- Distributes documents to industry-standard formats crews already recognize
- Handles large volumes of constantly changing data without cognitive overload
- Keeps sensitive production information secure without adding friction
THE SOLUTION
I looked at every existing production management platform and found the same pattern: tools built by software people who had never been on set. They were cloud-dependent, navigation-heavy, and required training. That's why the industry ignored them.
The insight that shaped everything came from field research: production teams need a wide-angle view of the whole day and the ability to drill into any detail without losing context. Every existing tool forced users to toggle between separate screens, breaking their mental model of the day each time they did it.
That observation produced the split-screen dashboard — a full-day overview on the left, detail panel on the right. It was borrowed from emergency management interfaces, where information hierarchy is life-or-death, not a preference. I eliminated redundant input fields, reduced mouse-click counts on every common task, and designed for the physical context of on-set use: gloved hands, bright sunlight, time pressure.
The platform focused first on the two documents every production department generates every single filming day: the call sheet and the production report. A shared crew list unified distribution. The database did the calculation work — crew hours, page counts, filming minutes — so the production team didn't have to.
THE PROCESS
The process began with sketches and rapid wire-frames to align with the development team on feature scope and technical feasibility. Rather than designing the full platform at once, I sequenced by priority: call sheets and production reports first, because they touched every person on set every day.
Once the interaction model was stable, I moved to high-fidelity design and built an image-linked prototype for user testing. I recruited film professionals — production coordinators, first ADs, and line producers — to run through real scenarios from their own productions. The single biggest pivot from that testing: separate dashboards for call sheets and reports created a false separation. Productions don't think that way. The concept of 'your filming day' unified everything naturally, and I redesigned around that model.
Code development officially started May 29, 2018. I continued designing in parallel with development — refining edge cases, documenting component behavior, and validating builds against the original research findings.
THE OUTCOME
CommonMarker's split-screen dashboard gave production teams the wide-angle view and the detail depth they needed without toggling between screens. The shared database eliminated the manual calculation errors that cause real budget overruns — crew hour miscounts, page count disputes, report inconsistencies.
Beyond usability, the platform addressed a problem the industry rarely discusses: a $50 million feature film generates an estimated 4,000 metric tons of CO2. Paper-heavy production management is a significant contributor. Mobile-first, online production management could save an estimated 1,500 hours on an average feature — keeping productions on time, on budget, and generating a fraction of the paper waste.
CommonMarker taught me something no client project can: what it means to own the full consequence of a design decision. When the research, the architecture, the interaction design, and the handoff are all yours, there is nowhere to hide and no one else to course-correct. That accountability is something I carry into every design leadership role.
