Storyboard Design Toolkit
Making storyboards easy for every team — even the people who can't draw.
Storyboards are one of the fastest ways to share an idea and get a team on the same page. But there's a catch. To make one, you usually have to draw — and most people can't. So teams skipped storyboards, even when they would have helped. I wanted to fix that. I wanted storyboards to be a tool anyone could use, not just designers who can draw.
My role
Product Designer
Scope
Design tooling · Self-initiated · Workflow improvement
Adopted by
5 teams · 938 total insertions
What I noticed
Teams wanted storyboards. The way we made them left most people out.
Every team agreed storyboards were useful. But few teams made them often. The reason wasn't the idea. It was the drawing.
To make a storyboard, people needed art skills, help, or a lot of time. Most didn't have those.
So they found their own ways around it:
Some spent hours drawing scenes from zero.
Some reused old, out-of-date pictures.
Some copied art from other files.
Some skipped storyboards completely.
The value was never the problem. The friction was.
Why it kept happening
There was no shared starting point.
Every storyboard looked different, because every person started from nothing. Different art styles. Different characters. Different sizes. Different templates.
The problem wasn't a lack of creativity. It was a missing system. There was no shared set of parts that people could pick up and reuse.
How I checked before building
I didn't want to build something no one needed. So I did three things first:
I searched Figma files across the company. I found teams outside of design already making storyboards.
I talked to a few of those non-designers. I asked what they were trying to say, and what made it hard.
I looked at what people had already figured out on their own — like my old iPad drawings being passed around as templates.
This told me what to build. Not a big, complex system. Just a simple kit of reusable parts that gave everyone the same visual language.
Turning my drawings into reusable parts
I had drawn the original characters and scenes on my iPad. So I knew the art. I also knew Figma well. That mix mattered.
I turned my hand-drawn art into Figma components with variables. In plain terms: one character could change expression, gesture, outfit, and color — all from a single part, with a few clicks.
Because I knew both sides — the drawing and the tool — I could build it fast. I shipped a first version in about two weeks. Then I made it better over time as teams started using it.
What I built
A simple, modular Figma library. Fast for designers. Easy for everyone else.
Characters
Six characters, so you can show different people in one story.
Expression
Change a character's face with one click — happy, unsure, surprised, and more.
Gestures
Pick a pose to show what the character is doing or feeling.
Outfit
Change the outfit — sleeves, collar, logo — to fit the character.
Add colors
Change colors to match the mood of your project.
Put everything together
Mix these parts to build a full scene.
Scene components
Ready-made backgrounds, UI frames, and layouts for the most common needs — product vision, user journeys, team presentations.
Templates
(fixed) Starter layouts, so you don't begin from a blank page.
What happened
Building before it was a request. The signs were already there — I just followed them
The kit reached 5 teams, with 938 component uses in total. One team went all in: Sales Vision & Strategy made it their main tool for sales and vision decks. Almost all of the use — 935 of 938 — came from them, a team outside my own design group. That's the part I'm proud of. It spread on its own, to people I didn't work with directly.
Impact
Designers stopped starting from a blank canvas. They reused shared parts and templates instead.
Non-designers made presentation-ready storyboards on their own. The gap between their work and a designer's got much smaller.
The old workaround — passing around my iPad drawings — became a real, shared system.
I shipped it in both Figma and PowerPoint, so everyone on the team could use it.
What I learned
One thing this taught me: the clearest sign to build something often isn't a request. It's people quietly working around the problem on their own.
No one asked me for this. But I love surprising people. I saw my old drawings being passed around as makeshift templates. That was enough for me to act. Most people don't make storyboards every day. But when they do, the blank page is the hardest part. This kit removed the blank page — for everyone, not just designers.