Roles: Product Design · UI Design · Concept · Interactive Prototype Tools: Figma

Every food app starts with the restaurant. You pick a place, then dig through a menu hoping something's good. That's backwards from how people actually decide. You see a plate, you want that one. Hot Plate is built on that inversion: the dish is the unit, not the venue.

We designed the concept end to end for a founder raising on it. The brief wasn't a deck, it was a product investors could hold and have it feel real.

Discovery is the product. Home is a social feed of plates from people you follow, plus a curated Overview, "Top Plates This Week," "Trending Now," "Most Photogenic," that reads like a streaming app for food. A near-black canvas lets the photography carry every screen, with one warm accent and glass navigation that stays out of the way.

Proof, not stars. The dish page leads with how friends actually recommend food: "93% would order again," verified posters who loved it, bookmark counts, a trending flag.

A layer, not a competitor. From any plate you're one tap from acting, delivery through Uber Eats, DoorDash, or Grubhub, a table through OpenTable or Resy. Hot Plate sits on top of the rails people already use, and the posts they share become the supply that fills the feed.

We shipped a clickable prototype, not static comps, so the founder could walk an investor through the real thing: open the feed, find a plate, see the proof, order it. The vision became something you could demo in the room instead of describe.