Picking Up the Scraps: How Redact Got Its Look

From the archive. This piece is restored from my old portfolio and lightly re-edited for the new site. The work predates the case studies on the homepage; the thinking held up, so here it is.

Redact is the platform that automatically cleans up your old posts across Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Discord, and more, all in one place. When I arrived, it was also a project whose former product designer had left before proper launch. What I inherited was scraps and a logo. What I designed from scratch: the design system, the desktop application for mobile and desktop, the full website, illustrations, social media ads, a v-tube model for the video tutorials, animations, and the marketing materials.

The app in the wild, captured from one of the video tutorials: the services grid, the scan card, and the v-tube model doing the talking in the corner. The design, the tutorial, and the mascot are all one designer.

The website

The founders gave me no-holds-barred creative freedom, and the website embodies what I do when I get it: I designed all the pages, animated the cats, and illustrated the squares. Alongside me was one of the best front-end developers I have worked with, Kevin "Shodyra" Choi, who translated every design 1:1 into code and, on his own initiative, carried the whole desktop design into responsive mobile like a wizard.

The app

The application wastes no time getting you to the thing you came for. Flows take the fewest clicks possible. Browser cookie login makes connecting your social accounts seamless. The deletion form lets you specify exactly what goes and what stays, with execution methods for every temperament: preview only, deletion mode, preview and delete, and a schedule for setting a recurring deletion cycle.

Not to dunk on the app, but it is a very cool GUI for deletion scripts to be run through. That was the point.

User-centric from the start

Redact took its users seriously from day one, with multiple feedback channels: Twitter on one end, a ticketing system inside Discord on the other. The bulk of the features and services in the application came from user feedback gathered throughout development. That habit, features driven by what users actually said, is the same one that later produced the A/B-tested activation redesign.

The Redact support Ticket Tool inside Discord, and the live dashboard showing 68,169,013 total redacted items across 17,009 unique machines — The receipts: the Discord Ticket Tool where support lives, and the live dashboard reading **68,169,013 redacted items across 17,009 unique machines**.

The cat

Redacto, the lovely cat who just likes fish, became a key part of the brand: illustrations, in-app animations, social media spots, and the v-tube model that fronts the tutorials. A privacy tool that deletes your history could easily feel grim. The cat is why it does not.

Redacto across formats: the ukiyo-e samurai shirt merch, a promo illustration, and the v-tube model rigged in Blender with its wireframe visible — One cat, every format: merch, marketing illustration, and the v-tube model mid-rig in Blender, wireframe and all. **Mascots are a production pipeline, not a sticker.**

Where it went

In March 2021 we took runner-up, 2nd place, at TechCrunch's Miami Spotlight, pitching the product and the vision. That September, the company reached a $3.5M valuation with zero marketing agency help, and I was the sole product designer through all of it. The numbers kept growing from there; the metrics story and the light mode story pick up where this one ends.