mmhmm

Employer:  All Turtles
Type: Series B
Industry: SAAS
Role: Sr. Design Director
Year: 2022-2024

Context

The Situation

mmhmm was born from a viral demo in 2020. Phil Libin, founder of Evernote, built a tool that let people overlay themselves on slides during video calls, turning a standard Zoom meeting into something that felt like live television. The demo spread. The company followed.

By the time my team at All Turtles became their embedded design partner, mmhmm was a Series B company with a real product, a real user base, and a real challenge: how do you keep a brand coherent and a product feeling fresh when the roadmap never stops moving?

Our answer was to function as a full creative department, brand marketing, and product support in equal measure, integrated closely enough to move at the speed the business required.

The Real Challenge

The hardest part of this engagement wasn't the creative work. It was the operational one.

The scope was genuinely wide: campaigns, web, email, in-app assets, iconography, illustration systems, event identities, product release communications, AI feature design, presentation templates, and swag. Running all of that simultaneously across a distributed team, with multiple design leads, content leads, motion, and engineering, without losing quality or coherence, requires a specific kind of leadership discipline.

What I built was a team structure and cadence that let different workstreams move in parallel without becoming disconnected. Clear ownership, shared standards, regular creative reviews. The work remained coherent because the team knew how they were supposed to work together.

The Team

• Allie Packard — Visual Design Lead
• Namika Hamasaki — Visual Design Lead
• Christina King — Visual Design Lead
• Carlos Rocafort — Illustration
• Peter Kemme - Motion Design
• David Perez — Content Lead
• Lina Koh — UX and Content
• Forrest Bryant — Content Director
• Clio Atencio — Sr. Design Director
  

My Role

As Sr. Design Director, I led the full creative scope across brand marketing and product support, setting direction, managing the team, partnering with mmhmm's executive leadership, and staying close enough to the work to maintain quality across many simultaneous initiatives.

This was the largest distributed team I managed at All Turtles, and one of the broadest creative scopes. The leadership challenge was as significant as the creative one.

Impact

• Led brand and marketing design across campaigns, web, email, events, and product communications for mmhmm over a two-year engagement
• Extended the brand into the product (iconography, illustration systems, in-app templates, and AI feature design), ensuring a coherent experience across every touchpoint
• Managed a large distributed multidisciplinary team across multiple simultaneous workstreams while maintaining brand consistency through continuous product evolution
• Supported mmhmm's brand foundation through its transition into Airtime Tools

What is mmhmm?

mmhmm is a video tool that makes meetings and recordings feel like live TV. It integrates with Zoom and Teams as a virtual camera, letting users appear alongside their slides in customizable layouts. Phil Libin built it around a simple conviction: video communication should be more engaging, more expressive, and less draining. The product is now evolving into Airtime Tools.

The Work

Brand

mmhmm's brand has a specific personality challenge: it needs to feel playful and human without losing the credibility a productivity tool requires. Lean too far into fun and enterprise buyers don't take it seriously. Lean too far into utility and you've described every other video tool on the market.

We maintained a dynamic visual system that held that balance — expressive enough to stand out on social and digital platforms, coherent enough to anchor a Series B product. The brand marks and expressions we developed over two years gave mmhmm a recognizable visual language that worked across contexts.

Web Design 

The mmhmm website was a moving target by design. Every major product release meant a revisit — new features to surface, new positioning to reflect, new conversion goals to serve. We evolved the site continuously alongside the product, ensuring the web experience kept pace with what the app could actually do.

The design challenge was maintaining narrative clarity through constant change. A website that's perpetually mid-update reads as chaotic. Ours didn't, because the visual system was stable enough to absorb the content changes without losing coherence.

Emails and Newsletters

We designed mmhmm's full email system — onboarding flows, feature announcements, engagement sequences, and product update communications. The goal was to make every email feel like it came from the same brand as the product, not a separate marketing department.

We saw directional positive signals in adoption and engagement from the email work, though we didn't run controlled tests to isolate the contribution.

Campaigns

Both campaigns were produced entirely in-house by a lean team — concept through post-production. That's worth noting because the output doesn't look lean.

Explain Yourself!

Showcased mmhmm's ability to make complex ideas visually engaging. Strategic landing pages supported conversion while reinforcing the brand's core mission.

How Did You  Do That!

Highlighted the communication superpowers mmhmm gives users across Zoom, Teams, Meet, and other platforms. Framed around the reaction a great mmhmm presentation reliably produces in other people.

Product Support

Brand and product were never separate workstreams on this engagement — they were one. The brand design team worked directly with the product team to extend the visual identity into the app itself.

Hype videos

For each major release, we produced short feature announcement videos that made product improvements feel worth getting excited about.

Iconography and illustrations system

We built a unified system that scales across the full mmhmm ecosystem, improving usability and visual consistency simultaneously.

Link Preview Images

On-brand visuals for every shared link across social, messaging, and search. A small detail that compounds across millions of impressions.

Product Backgrounds

We developed the library of rooms and backgrounds available inside the app, extending the brand directly into the user's moment of expression.

AI Product Feature 

We designed the UI and visual language for mmhmm's AI-powered video creation tool, which guides users through generating authentic unscripted video by answering AI-generated questions rather than writing a script. A genuine 0→1 product design contribution.

In-App Presentation Templates

A suite of templates that became a core part of the product experience, reducing the blank-canvas barrier for new users and driving early activation.

Product Update Communications

Each release was announced via email, a dedicated landing page, and in-app messaging, all designed in parallel to feel like one coherent moment rather than three separate communications.

"Remote Works" Event

In May 2024, we created the full visual identity for mmhmm's Remote Works summit — a week-long event on the future of remote and hybrid work, anchored by Phil Libin's keynote on "fewer, better meetings." The event identity spanned digital promotion, motion, and event materials, and reinforced mmhmm's position as a thought leader in the space it was trying to change.

What I'd Do Differently

With a team this size and a scope this wide, I'd build in more deliberate creative synthesis moments — regular sessions where the full team steps back from their individual workstreams and looks at the whole. When you're running eight things simultaneously, it's easy for each one to be good while the sum feels slightly disconnected. The brand stayed coherent, but there were moments where the connective tissue between workstreams was thinner than I'd want. Investing more time in those synthesis moments would have made the overall output more than the sum of its parts.

heraclio@designstgy.com