
Kris Mendoza
Product Designer in Brooklyn, NY, He/Him
Hello, I'm Kris, a multi-disciplinary designer and photographer living in Brooklyn.
Currently, I'm open to short-medium term contract design work. One of my personal philosophies is challenging assumptions and looking for "out of the box" solutions, merging craft, intention and loosely-held convictions in order to build something truly great.
Outside of work, I run Studio Kasama, a creative space and artist collective in Clinton Hill.
Work Experience
My independent design practice based out of Brooklyn, NY
Primary responsibilities include creating, maintaining and scaling VSCO's Design System across iOS, Android and web, partnering with engineers and product throughout the organization to implement consistent experiences. Other responsibilities include developing internal frameworks, tool kits and resources for product-marketing and design, as well as redesigning internal tooling to scale with the business.
Product, design and engineering are encouraged to pitch ideas for new products and form teams within Dynamo, Dropbox’s internal incubator. As design lead, partnered with a product manager and an engineer, we sought out to build the ‘work-focused’ web browser, for which we have several patents for. We conducted our own market-research, customer development and user interviews to inform problem-solution-fit, and eventually launched a beta internally.
Design lead on customer acquisition and activation, working closely with cross-functional partners (PM, Engineering, Design Research, Data Analytics, etc.) to build an ambitious approach to new user onboarding, which connected disparate experiences under one holistic customer-centric journey. One key principle we pushed forward was modularization, so that other product teams across the organization were able to onboard their customers in similar, yet customizable ways.
Designed stateful experiences to drive engagement and retention, such as allowing users to choose new content they’d like to see in their Pinterest feed. During my time there, we led a cross-functional (Brand, PM, Engineering, Data Analytics etc.) workshop to reimagine the user onboarding process, focusing on the core value proposition that Pinterest is a place to ‘do’ things.
At Highlight, I designed and tested many novel social products, during a time where Snapchat was seeing rapid popularity. Some of these products ranged from lightweight social interactions between close friends to more frictionless ways of sharing photos between close friends (pre-Instagram-stories).
In March 2016, we launched Shorts, a photo-sharing app centered around the camera roll. It received Editor’s Choice on the App Store a few weeks later.
Eventually, Highlight was acquired by Pinterest in July 2016.
Exhibitions
Peter Redmond curated this solo exhibit of portraits that explored queer men feeling seen, and the intimate interplay between being guarded and fully disarmed.
Education
Certifications
A year-long post-graduate program done through the Cooper Union in NYC, which teaches the fundamentals of designing typefaces and type families. Students explore building custom typefaces from scratch and learn how to incorporate historical influences into their process.