Marketplace · Service Design · UI/UX
Greg: matchmaking for the woodworking craft
A two-sided app connecting woodworking ateliers, clients and beginners.
- Role
- Lead Designer · end to end
- Timeline
- 2–3 months
- Year
- 2023
- Team
- Me + 2 designers · Postgraduate programme at IED
Matching the craft with the people who need it.
Woodworking marketplace · 2023
Foundations · colour
Five values, one warm workshop palette
Ink
oklch(0.24 0.02 60)
48%
Bone
oklch(0.94 0.006 80)
24%
Wine
oklch(0.43 0.14 25)
14%
Amber
oklch(0.85 0.13 85)
9%
Amber deep
oklch(0.72 0.13 75)
5%
Type
Display 28 / 1.05
Title 18 / 1.15
Body 14 / 1.55 — grotesque, never geometric
Mono 11 — labels, specs, tokens
Space & radius
4
8
12
16
24
32
4pt grid · radius 8 / 12 / full · touch target 44
Hi, Marcos
Monday
20
Craft & Design Day
What do you want to do today?
Workshops
Makers
Networking
Visit
Latest saved
01 — The starting point
A craft economy running on word of mouth alone.
This was my postgraduate project in Strategic Design & Innovation at IED, built across two disciplines — Service Design and UI/UX. Starting from field observation, we found woodworking workshops with idle capacity and no visibility, people who could not tell a serious workshop from a risky one, and beginners with nowhere to learn the trade. The product had to serve both sides of that exchange.
- 2–3
- months, end to end
- 2
- disciplines connected: service and UI/UX
- 3
- flows designed, prototyped and documented
02 — Role and team
I ran the process end to end, with two designers alongside me.
A group of three
Two other designers worked with me on research and service artefacts. There was no management relationship between us — we shared the field work, and I carried the process from framing to prototype.
What I owned
Context observation, problem framing, the service concept, the product proposition, the whole interface, the brand and mascot, the documented foundations and the interactive prototype.
03 — Foundations
Warm, sturdy, documented — the opposite of a generic app.
Colour from the material
Bone, ink, wine and amber: the palette comes from wood, sawdust and the red of workshop tooling. Flat surfaces only, no gradients.
Typography with a grip
A grotesque display with tight leading for headlines, a neutral text face for reading and a mono for labels and specs — no geometric rounded type.
States before hand-off
4pt grid, 44pt touch targets, and every component documented in default, hover, pressed, selected and disabled — plus semantic feedback that never relies on colour alone.
Foundations · colour
Five values, one warm workshop palette
Ink
oklch(0.24 0.02 60)
48%
Bone
oklch(0.94 0.006 80)
24%
Wine
oklch(0.43 0.14 25)
14%
Amber
oklch(0.85 0.13 85)
9%
Amber deep
oklch(0.72 0.13 75)
5%
Type
Display 28 / 1.05
Title 18 / 1.15
Body 14 / 1.55 — grotesque, never geometric
Mono 11 — labels, specs, tokens
Space & radius
4
8
12
16
24
32
4pt grid · radius 8 / 12 / full · touch target 44
04 — The flows
Three flows, rebuilt so the match happens in the first session.
Onboarding asks only what the match needs and returns value immediately. Search compares workshops by craft, distance and evidence of work instead of price alone. Mentorship turns interest into an agreed first step — two afternoons a month, a real piece, a named commitment.
A guided entry that learns who you are before asking for anything.
Hi, I'm Greg!
Every day I make it all.
Always.
I make your working day easier, so you win back time and quality in the craft.
How would you describe yourself?
Knowing where you stand lets me be far more precise with you.
Independent maker
Workshop owner
So you run a workshop!
What's its name?
How many people work there?
What are you looking for?
Pick as many as you like — this feeds your matches.
05 — What the project delivered
A service concept with a product you can actually tap through.
Service concept
Field observation, personas and a two-sided value exchange that made the matchmaking rule explicit instead of implicit.
Product and brand
Name, mascot, voice, palette, type and a component library — a warm identity built to feel like a workshop, not a generic marketplace.
Prototype
A clickable prototype covering onboarding, search, profile, saved groups and mentorship, with documented states and micro-interactions.
06 — Looking back
Designing for a trade I had to go and watch first.
What I learned
Observation beats assumption. The mentorship idea only appeared because we watched how skill actually passes between generations in a workshop.
What made it work
Keeping service and interface in the same conversation: every journey decision had a screen, and every screen could be traced back to something we saw in the field.
What I would change today
I would treat the foundations as a real system from day one — tokens, states and a written rationale — and use AI to accelerate synthesis and copy variants while keeping the field evidence as the source of truth.