The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Back to feedPost
Why give this much thought to a screen that, by definition, has nothing on it yet?
An empty state usually gets treated as an afterthought, the screen designed last because there's technically nothing to show. For a medication tracker, I didn't treat it that way. This is the first thing someone sees before they've trusted the app with anything, and the category carries weight most empty states don't have to deal with. A blank task list just means you haven't planned your day. A blank medication screen can sit next to real anxiety, about forgetting a dose, or about needing this kind of help at all.
So the illustration isn't there to fill space. It's there so the first emotional beat is calm instead of clinical, before a single word of copy gets read. The line underneath doesn't report a system state either, it talks like it's speaking to a person, not describing an empty array.
The day picker across the top stays visible even with nothing scheduled. That was deliberate too. Someone should understand the shape of this app, a day-by-day companion, not a buried list, before they've added anything to it.
I'd rather someone feel steady in the first five seconds than impressed by the illustration. The calm was the point, not the art style.
Product designer based in Lagos. This is the kind of reasoning that goes into a screen most people design in five minutes.
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
Connect with clients, get discovered, and run your business 100% commission-free
Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
Trending
retrofuturism
Share your favorite designs from the past exploring the distant future. Or your own take on the aesthetic 🚀
halftone
Dots. Texture. Grain. Let's see your designs using the halftone technique.
Midjourney
Creatives are showing off what they're making with Midjourney.
colorgrade
Video editors sound off: How do you enhance the mood of your video in color grading?
Related posts
Beacon – Mobile App Redesign
The Client
A mental health startup building a social platform where people can share moods, “light a beacon” when they need support, and connect with an empathetic community.
Problems
The product needed a clearer user experience and stronger emotional design to ensure safety, trust, and intuitive navigation for users who may be in vulnerable states.
Goals
Create a calm, supportive app experience that makes emotional expression simple, encourages meaningful community interaction, and builds user trust.
Solution
Led the full UX/UI design process, from product audit and research to user flows, wireframes, and high-fidelity screens, creating a clear, cohesive, and empathetic mobile experience.
Looks great !
How do you keep a brand's promise of calm intact once real users start clicking through checkout?
Mudita builds minimalist devices around one idea: technology that harmonizes with your life instead of competing for your attention. The brandbook lays that promise out in detail - tone, restraint, what the brand should never feel like. My job was carrying that same discipline into the product itself.
I worked across the checkout flow, the storefront and category browsing, and the product page above the fold - three surfaces where small frictions had quietly built up against the brand's own case for calm. The brandbook gave the rules. The UI work was making sure those rules survived contact with a real cart and a real user.
For the case study visuals, I used AI for the first time to produce product footage 🤖 - wind moving through a scene, an object drifting in place. Higgsfield was genuinely a good way to learn that workflow fast.
Full case study - actual before/after breakdowns - is up on Behance 🔗, linked below.
Genuinely curious where people land on this: generating production assets with AI is fast, and honestly kind of fun as a workflow - but there's real pushback that it's taking work away from people who used to shoot this stuff. Where do you fall on that?
The checkout flow detail is what stands out to me, that's usually where a brand's calm promise turns into three different button behaviors fighting each other. On your AI question, I think it matters less whether it's fast and more who's checking the output against the brand's...
Awesome!
