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The Design Channel’s from /design on Farcaster is a publication that extends the conversation beyond casts — featuring essays, interviews, and deep dives from the Farcaster design community. It’s a space to document ideas, share process, and explore how design shapes the products we use every day. Designer Of The Week is hosted by the /design channel and releases each Monday at 3pm GMT+1 / 7am PDT/ 2pm UTC Interested in writing for The Design Channel? Drop us a DM on Farcaster or 0xdesignchannel@gmail.com.
Erica is the cofounder of Unofficial, a discovery engine for onchain content. Unofficial’s flagship product is Uno, a people-first Farcaster client. With a background in UX and web design, she recently transitioned into full-stack development while building Uno over the past year.
Outside of work, Erica enjoys making pottery, practicing yoga, going to the gym, cuddling her cat Pear, line dancing with her queer community, raving, hosting dinner parties, and browsing the internet for supplies for her next soon-to-be-abandoned hobby. In the coming months, she’ll be focused on handmaking furniture and decorating her new apartment.
Curiosity combined with a lean forward mentality. I think you can quite literally achieve anything if you have those two qualities. They set you up to be the perfect generalist - someone who has a hunger to absorb new information but then also apply that new information. It shows up a lot in the synthesis stage, as I pull inspiration from so many different sources and disciplines to lay down the initial foundation of a design.
My mentality is very much “I don’t know how to do it, but I know I can figure it out.”
Also high key ADHD is a super power for creatives, if you can learn how to harness it. Creativity is divergent thinking, and people with ADHD tend to think more divergently than those without!
Uno, a people-first client for Farcaster. It’s the first experience I am both designing and developing. That in and of itself excites me, but it’s also extra exciting because it’s also the first thing I’ve ever worked on truly for myself*, and not for another boss or company or team.
As a UX designer, I obviously have to clarify I am of course building with our user base in mind.
I recently designed the guided onboarding flow for new users in Uno after they’ve created their account and landed on the home feed. We want to guide users to do the typical social setup - follow 10 people, complete your profile, post your first cast, etc - so they can hit the ground running and feel comfortable navigating within Uno.
I don’t have a set process or any strict flow I follow, but it tends to consolidate into some sort of pattern: a diverge, converge, diverge, converge cycle.
For these onboarding screens, I did a speed design session where I spit out about 20-30 different variations of the onboarding screen template and the different components I’d be using within it.
Next I did a quick culling and filtered out the ones that I instantly knew weren’t right. I squeezed out a few more iterations based off of what worked in those designs and then did another round of culling. At that point I was ready for feedback and showers the final selections to my cofounder, Christopher. Once we decided on the final screen(s), I let them sit for a day, and came back to cut out anything that seemed superfluous or distracting in the design after I took time away from it. Voilà!
Being able to build my designs, like actually code them, has never made me feel more empowered as a designer. I’ve always had good relationships with past dev teams, and we were always able to speak in a similar language when handing off screens, but actually writing code for the past year has shown me how much I really didn’t understand back then and how much more is possible. Also - UX design can totally be applied to how you code.
I’ve always thought web and product designers should learn some coding basics, but I think the future is set to highly value design engineers.
See this cast for I really felt at the time:
dudes lowkey the product designer in me is cackling inside right now i dreamed of having this control over design and component systems my entire time in product/web design the amount of hours i spent inspecting every component and every page post-dev to spot all the inconsistencies my god bUT NOW it is all under my domain i can't be stopped https://farcaster.xyz/erica/0x91c148c2
Since we’ve just been designing and building the foundation of the Uno farcaster experience, we haven’t had any major design challenges other than our initial branding and UI styling. Our biggest design challenge we face right now is "what feature will best communicate the power of our discovery models?”
To be solved, still!
Good old pen and paper baby. I can’t seem to think as well if I’m typing, ideating in Figma, or doing anything screen-based.
I turn to a new environment. I feel the best way to get unstuck is to move something - move your body, change the 4 walls surrounding you, reorient your desk, go for a day trip, go for a long trip if you’re really stuck and uninspired, go out and buy a new candle or incense scent or a new flavour of gum, go for a walk and have a chat with a friend. Do anything and everything but think about the problem you’re stuck on, as long as you’re moving and changing something!
It’s pretty cool because I’m already getting to do exactly that - I don’t have to imagine how. I’ve had a note on my phone since 2017 titled "everything wrong with social media and how it can be better". I was a tattoo apprentice and illustrator at the time, and instagram was the main way to get discovered by clients. Even in 2017, I was already swimming upstream in trying to understand the algorithm and how best to use hashtags so potential clients and followers could discover me. After a year I had only mustered up a few hundred followers and a few clients, and my list of what was wrong in social media grew quite long in those 12 months. Fast forward seven years later, and I cofounded a company where I actually am getting to implement some of these ideas!
Time spent with friends. I’m really lucky that I live in a city where there isn’t a huge tech scene. Almost none of my friends work in tech - they’re civil rights and tenants rights lawyers, high school and trade school teachers, artists, sommeliers…anything except tech. Spending time with them is like a breath of fresh air, and it helps me show up to work more grounded and build with them in mind - not just the little tech vacuum we’ve carved out for ourselves.
Thank you Erica for joining us today!
You can connect with Erica:
personality hire 🌈🤙 fullstack & ux, building /uno
personality hire 🌈🤙 fullstack & ux, building /uno
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Read the previous Designer Of The Week Featuring Zack Labadie from Uniswap here:
Zack (@labadie.eth) is a product designer at Uniswap, where he's part of a close-knit design team working on the mobile app, browser extension, and main trading interface. With around 10 years of experience in digital product design, Zack has long embraced a generalist mindset-well before it became a buzzword.
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