Nick Cernera

Nick Cernera

Senior Product Designer in New York Area

About

Senior Product Designer @ Plural

I love designing for early stage startups.
It gives me energy.

When I design I focus on pragmatism, speed, and consistency.

I partner closely with frontend engineers throughout my design process. A design is only as good as its implementation, and an implementation is only as good as its frontend engineer is happy.

I live and breathe design systems.

Contact

LinkedIn

Work Experience

2024 — Now
NYC, NY

Re-joined Plural as a Senior Product Designer to lead and execute on all design initiatives in the company.

2023 — 2024

Founding designer and ninth employee.

Leading the design of Sky Strife, an onchain video game.
Executed on all non-technical aspects of the production of the game from conception to live launch.

2022 — 2023
Remote

As the eighth employee and founding designer at Plural, I've led the design of our design system, core product, and onboarding experience.

I've also collaborated with my VP of Design to design our docs, blog, marketing website, and a brand refresh.

Nowadays (Q1, 2023) I am working on improving our onboarding and core product through UX research and data-driven insights.

2021 — 2022
Remote

I maintained and contributed to the design system and led the design of two products from conception to delivery—an iOS app redesign and a net-new feature, a SaaS dashboard.

Projects

2023
Console Redesign at Plural

After being design complete in Q4 2022, the redesign of our core product is almost done being implemented and is set to be released in February of 2023.

⁂ I will add a demo environment link once implementation is complete, but for now, I'll attach some mockups below.

2022

Utilized the design system I created from scratch to lead the redesign of our app—a marketplace and account management platform to manage your open-source applications.

⁂ You have to sign up to see the app, so I'll post some images of the live app below.

2022

I collaborated with my VP of Design to design and deliver our new docs site.

I was primarily responsible for the creation and documentation of new components, while she led the overall layout and interaction design.

2022

I first designed our UI-based onboarding experience 0 → 1, then iterated on it multiple times since. We have been seeing conversion rates rising since, nearly doubling since the beginning.

2022

I collaborated with my VP of Design to design this website, then built and maintained it on Webflow.

2022
Design System at Plural

I designed our design system from scratch following the principles of atomic design.

This system has since been praised highly by both the frontend team and my VP of Design as being the easiest to use design system they've seen—especially at an early stage startup.

Education

2017 — 2019
Math/Philosophy at TCNJ
Ewing, NJ

I was originally planning on going into Academia before deciding to transition to Product Design and tech.