Chris Melamed - Product Designer

A while agoSaint Ann's School

I was one of two Product Designers who brought the Meta AI standalone mobile app from zero to one.

Features I designed include:

Onboarding
The Conversation View
Rich AI Responses
Image generation
Video generation
and more!

I established and maintain the Meta AI design system, which currently has over 150,000 component insertions a week.

My work was regularly reviewed by Mark Zuckerberg, members of the C-Suite, and senior executives across the company.

Upon launch, the app reached #2 in the App Store.

Descript is a video editor that works like a text editor.

Over three years, I worked on pretty much every part of the product, including:

The Core Editor
The Canvas
Properties
Compositions
The Recorder
Descript Drive

Outside of feature work, I conceived of, pitched, and directed design work for a full product and brand redesign.

I led the design team in a full product and brand redesign. Over the course of my tenure, we grew from $3m to $40m ARR.

As a part of Facebook's New Product Experimentation team, I was the founding and sole designer on a new standalone mobile app called Collab. I designed every pixel of the product and the brand for the app.

Collab was a collaborative tool for creating and sharing music. At launch, it reached #1 in the Music category on the App Store.

I was awarded a U.S. Patent for design of Collab’s clip-syncing system. Ultimately, the product did not have the escape velocity to stand alone in Facebook’s family of apps. We ultimately sunsetted the mobile app and Open Sourced Collab’s syncing engine.

Kleiner Perkins Design Fellowship Preview

I was one of 15 selected from over 2,500 applicants to be a Design Fellow for Kleiner Perkins. The program placed designers early in their careers at portfolio companies.

I spent a year working at a startup called Ripcord, leading design as their first Product Designer. I designed and helped build a record navigation platform, and helped establish the company’s brand identity.

Believe it or not, I joined Adobe as a filmmaking intern. I was hired by the design team, who quickly realized there were more products to design than films to make, and I transitioned to Product Design.

I sat next to a designer named Kyeung who generously took an interest in cultivating my design sense. Whenever I presented work, he would point at each element and simply ask, “Why?” I owe much of my career today to this gentle steer.

With Kyeung, I designed and prototyped Dealpage, a virtual data room in which two parties engaged in a deal can securely share sensitive documents. This zero to one effort was eventually incorporated into Adobe Acrobat.

Wavefield is a playful point matrix sandbox that responds to touch and can simulate waves, rain, wind, and snow. It can also be used as a low-res display to render icons, images, or even your camera stream.

I built Wavefield with the help of Claude Code and Cursor to explore recreating simple 3 dimensional physics with tricks of 2D space. It’s a fun and surprisingly expressive sandbox that I’m excited to continue building out.

I designed EveryDay to help me keep a more consistent journaling practice. It’s minimalist and makes dictating my thoughts effortless.

The app uses Apple’s vision framework to find and suggest relevant images based on what I’ve written in my entries.

The journal is secured with biometrics and all entries are stored on device, making your library of entries portable should you want to move to a different journal.

The app is currently in development, and I’m hoping to release it this Summer or Fall, time permitting.

I applied to Yale as a physics major, started pre-med, spent Sophomore year as an architecture major, came dangerously close to pursuing fine art or computer science, and ultimately completed my degree in Cognitive Science. At the time it was stressful, looking back, it rocked.

My undergraduate thesis was advised by Laurie Santos. I explored the neurological underpinnings of Optimism Bias, the tendency we all have to lie to ourselves when given unfavorable information. By tracking subjects’ pupil dilation, I found that unfavorable information is encoded in memory, but is actively inhibited during retrieval. If you’re interested, you can read the paper here.

This project was eye-opening for me. I learned about the rigor of the scientific method, the importance of experimental design, and then effort it takes to push the frontiers of knowledge even an inch.