About

Cynthia Shen

Product and digital designer with eight years across brand, UX and campaign design — repeatedly the sole designer trusted with a company’s entire visual output.

San Francisco Bay Area English / Mandarin US work-authorized, no sponsorship needed Résumé (PDF) ↗

👋🏻 Hi again, I am Cynthia. Thank you for learning more about me.

🎨 I’m a curious-driven person. Constantly learning and applying the skills and knowledge on problem-solving makes me feel rewarding. A brand new challenge will excite me.

🔮 In my spare time, you will see me learning code or experimenting with posters in cafés. You might also see me hiking with my friends, or visiting art events. I might also invite a friend to try my new dishes, and send my paintings as a gift to them.

Today I cut flagship timelines by 80%+ through agile workflows and automation, run end-to-end AI production pipelines, and back design decisions with funnel data.

My values

What I work by

💞 Empathy

Always listen actively and put myself in someone else’s shoes, which gives me a better understanding and avoids falling into designer biases.

😍 Passionate about building & experiment

Painting, coding and designing are all like “building”, which always gives me a great sense of achievement and makes me constantly experiment bravely.

📚 Stay humble & always learning

Only by humbly accepting all different opinions and non-stop learning actively can we continue to understand more things and constantly break our cognitive boundaries.

🤹🏻 Embrace new changes

Always be ready to adjust direction and strategy, because life is a great agile development testing field.

Career

Where I’ve worked

The full detail, with numbers, is in the résumé.

Résumé (PDF) ↗

2025.3 — Present

Lead AI Product Designer

Friant & Associates · B2B & B2C furniture · San Leandro, CA

Own campaign design end to end for three product lines, defined the dual-brand narrative system, and rebuilt the design foundations — a 19,020-node Figma file down to 27 canonical components.
2026 — Present

Creative Partner

Dreamina (ByteDance)

Produce brand-grade AI video with reproducible results, and created RDC — a five-stage concept-to-delivery pipeline with model-per-shot-type selection.
2026 — Present

Founding Design Partner

UpdateWave · updatewave.org

Founding designer for a pre-permit construction-leads marketplace, live and billing customers. Built the brand from zero and delivered it as Tailwind tokens for engineering handoff.
2023.5 — 2024.6

Digital Designer, sole designer

The U.S. Trading Company · B2B food distributor · Hayward, CA

Cut the annual product catalog timeline from six months to two weeks, and delivered the company’s full marketing surface under a cross-platform style guide.
2021 — 2023

UI / Visual Designer

Freelance

Shipped 4+ UX/UI projects — over 90 screens — with reusable component systems.
2017.4 — 2020.1

UX / Visual Designer, founding designer

Chivalri Culture Exchange · education services · Shanghai / Hayward

Redesigned every company platform around its target users, and rebuilt the brand system on modular principles — marketing production speed up 200%.
2014.5 — 2015.5

Graphic Designer & Associate Curator

Shanghai Xiangjiang Gallery

Drove artwork sales up 14% with a brand-value method, and co-curated two exhibitions end to end.

Education & certificates

Where I learned it

Education & programs

BA in Fine ArtShanghai Normal University — Challenge Cup and Zhixing Cup awards
Virtual Internship ExperienceAccenture — Product Design / Process Design

Certificates

DeepLearning.AI — Agent Skills with Anthropic2026
Udacity Nano-DegreeUX Designer
UdemyUX Design Essentials · UI/UX Pattern
CourseraGraphic Designer · Brand
LinkedIn LearningGraphic Designer · Brand Design · HTML & CSS

Off the clock

How I spare time

I am a curious person, driven by an endless desire to explore and understand the world. Reading is one of my primary ways of exploration; it continually broadens and refreshes my understanding.