For every Samsung flagship launch, retail staff on the Backstage platform competed to win prizes by learning about the new product. For the Galaxy S8 and S8+, the feature to showcase was the Infinity Display — no borders, no limits. The competition needed to feel like that.

My job was to design an interactive drawing tool that retail staff could pick up instantly, play with on any device, and actually enjoy using.

DISCOVERY

There was no time for formal research or user testing — the launch timeline didn’t allow it. So I looked at the simplest drawing tools people already knew: MS Paint, basic sketching apps. The goal wasn’t to reinvent anything. It was to take something familiar and make it feel fresh enough to match the energy of a flagship launch.

I defined the minimum set of features needed to make it work: zoom, line style, line thickness, a fixed palette of 8 colours, 8 patterns, and 30 stickers. The colour picker was scoped out, not enough time to build it properly, so a curated set of 8 colours was the right call. Every feature on the list had to earn its place.

WHAT I DID

I designed the full interface and all the tools: clean, minimal, and easy to navigate on both desktop and mobile. The 30 stickers were designed from scratch. Patterns were built to change colour dynamically so users could personalise without the complexity of a full colour system.

Users could paint on a white canvas, on a photo, or directly on an image on the device. Undo, redo, reset, and save kept the experience forgiving — the kind of tool where you could experiment without worrying about making a mistake.

OUTCOME

The response was huge. More importantly, the tool worked well enough that it was reused for three more Samsung product launches, which was never the original plan. 

Software

Sketch