Motif
A photo library holds plenty of memories, but making a book from them can feel like another project. I helped create Motif inside Apple Photos, giving people an easier way to get from pictures to print.
- Team
- — Cross-functional Fjord, RRD, product, design, and engineering team
- Industry
- — Consumer, Photo Products, E-commerce
- Website
- — motifphotos.com
Tools & technologies
The Problem
Making a photo book meant starting with too many decisions.
The approach
How the work took shape
Follow the book beyond the screen
Motif was R.R. Donnelley's first consumer photo product. I helped map the whole service, from selecting pictures to checkout, production, and delivery. Print formats, crop quality, and price all affected what the editor needed to explain before someone placed an order.
Give people a first draft
Smart selection, auto-flow, and templates gave the book an initial shape. People could then spend time on the choices that made it theirs: the sequence, the crop, the words, and the format. I designed the automation to leave those choices open to revision.
Stay at home in Photos
The editor lived inside an app people already used. I led interaction patterns and prototypes that respected that familiarity while making room for a much deeper creation and purchase flow. Reusable interface decisions kept the editor consistent as the detail grew.
The hard parts
The constraint
An automatic layout could save effort and still make a personal book feel generic.
The decision
We treated the layout as an editable first draft, keeping the meaningful choices with the customer.
The constraint
The ease of the editor had to carry through to a physical printed product.
The decision
I mapped the service and brought format, crop, pricing, and production constraints into the design work.
Product Experience
Native macOS Editor
The editor, pricing, and checkout sit within the familiar Apple Photos environment.
Editable First Draft
An automatic layout gets the book started; each page remains open to changes.
App Store Launch
Motif launched through Apple's extension and App Store distribution model.
The outcome
What changed
The result
- ✓Launched photo books, calendars, and cards as a native Apple Photos extension.
- ✓Generated more than $100K in revenue in the first three months.
- ✓Featured at WWDC 2018 and recorded a 4.0/5 App Store rating across 243 ratings.
- ✓The product later expanded to iPhone and iPad. Mimeo acquired Motif and its related assets in 2023.
Looking back
The first draft did much of the practical work. Leaving it editable gave people a way to make the result personal.
Looking beyond the editor changed the design. A crop or format choice on screen became a promise about what would arrive in the mail.
Where I contributed
Product
- Connected creation and checkout with print production and delivery.
Design
- Led interaction design and prototypes for the editor and its reusable patterns.
Engineering
- Worked with engineers on Photos extension constraints, rendering, print, and checkout behavior.
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