This is the lesson learned while designing the early stage of bublibu?

Don't design too early

At the start, I gave Bublibu no design identity. No brand colors, no logo, no typography decision, no illustration assets. Just plain wireframes.

Before another designer joined the team, I was running both tracks alone wireframing and visual exploration simultaneously. That split focus was a problem. Visual exploration is an open-ended process; it expands to fill whatever time you give it. And while I was generating design alternatives, the development team was waiting for flows they could actually build.

So I made a call: wireframes and wireflow first, everything else after. The MVP needed to ship. A polished visual identity could wait.

That's the principle behind "don't design too early." It's not that visual design doesn't matter it's that committing to it before the product direction is stable creates work you'll likely redo. Stay loose until the product tells you what it needs.

Why dont commit too early?

Most early-stage products shift direction more than once. Usually more than twice." Same point, no baggage.

If you try to reach for a polished visual system, a tight brand guide, a clean component library and they spend weeks on infrastructure that will need to be rebuilt the moment the product direction shifts. Which it always does. so that's why i set my design work at low commitment at the beginning to keep the design team agile to follow product direction shift.

The design team

I didn't mix visual exploration and product design wireframing at one phase. Either you work on the wireframe fist or you split into 2 teams to work on this things in pararel first team were working on mapping all the business model and requirement from business analyst from the product owner, the second team is working with brand manager and creative team to define the identity of the products such as tone of voice, branding, typography and semiotics.

At bublibu I co work with my graphic designer Krisna Tri Anugrah to explore the visual direction while i was working on the wireframe and interaction design.

Design alignment & Boundaries

As a design lead i responsible to assure my designer work within responsible area. They need to design things that's necessary and mandatory i means it required by my screen interactions, not something unusable and random, thats why we set a design meetings and alignment as a boundaries whats need to explore.

• Not re explore the samething with what im doing (redundant explorations)
• Only work for respectable area that important for MVP phase not overstepping the production team.
• Also aligned with the intention or perception of the Business owner

1st team - Designing the wireframe

This is the team that translating the requirement and business process from product manager, A brief from a PM or business owner typically contains the what and the why  "we need a seller onboarding flow" or "users need to be able to track their order." What it almost never contains is the how. That gap is exactly where the wireframing process begins.

The first thing an interaction designer does isn't draw. It's ask questions  or if they can't ask, make assumptions explicit. What's the user's context when they hit this screen? What do they already know? What do they need to decide? What can go wrong? im not gonna too detail on this, but here's the task list of the first team:

• Breaking the brief into tangible flow
• Understood where's the process is located in the architecture
• Undercover the edge cases and permutations
• Gave mitigation strategy while the main flow is not working
• Align the wireframe with the users mental models

2nd team - The design explorations

Before Krisna joined, I was handling visual exploration on top of the wireframing work. In practice that meant the wireframes suffered I was spending too much time generating design alternatives when the development team needed tangible flows to build from. When Krisna came on as our second designer, I handed the visual exploration track to him entirely and refocused on interaction design and wireflow across the remaining product features.

The visual exploration process font decisions, character design, illustration system is covered in a separate article with more detail and full visual references.

What I'd tell another designer doing this

The designer instinct when joining an early-stage startup is to establish everything — lock down the colors, build the component library, write the brand guide. It feels like discipline. But actually a trap and slowdown the development process.

What you need at the start is enough of a direction that the team can make decisions coherently — and nothing more. A tone. A character. A few key screens that demonstrate the intent. The rest should stay loose until the product tells you what it needs.

At Bublibu, I set a direction to keep design identity lightweight. It wasn't a resource constraint. It was a deliberate choice to stay moveable. The product shifted direction multiple times. The visual language shifted with it, without anyone having to throw away months of work.

The test of a good early design identity isn't whether it looks finished. It's whether it survives the first pivot intact.