How I Helped Build Disney’s First Digital Collectibles Platform

A new platform. A new kind of fandom. A lot of pins.

Disney Pinnacle is a platform for high-end digital collectibles where users can hunt for, collect, trade and curate exclusive officially licensed rare digital pins featuring beloved characters from Disney, Pixar and Star Wars.

The teaser that earned us thousands of subscribers before launch.

The challenge

Disney Pinnacle was an experiment: what happens when you take the thrill of physical pin trading and bring it into the digital world?
Partnering with Dapper Labs (creators of NBA Top Shot, CryptoKitties and more), Disney wanted to test whether collectors would embrace digital pins. The goal was to create Disney Pinnacle, a digital collectible buying and trading platform that would honor the experience of physical pin trading and the legacy of Disney, Pixar, and Star Wars.

I joined from day one as the lead designer on the Disney side, helping shape everything from brand identity to product structure, right up to closed beta launch. While I wasn’t given a typical UX problem (we were starting from scratch), within the scope of defining success, I knew I was still solving for questions like:

How do we translate the physical joy of pin trading into a digital space?
How do we create trust and delight in a new platform with no existing audience?
How do we make digital collectibles feel meaningful, not gimmicky?
How do we make the platform enticing for both hardcore Disney fans and established Web3 collectors?

My role

As the product designer on Disney’s side, I wore many hats and made a lot of calls (design-wise):

Led design direction on Disney’s side from inception to launch, shaping branding, UX, and product decisions.
Art directed the platform’s visual identity, shaping the logo, iconography, and collectible display system in collaboration with Dapper’s design team
Advocated for a user-centered, story-driven experience while balancing business goals and brand integrity

Constraints

Operated on an tight 6-month timeline set by our business partner due to budget constraints.
Navigated a major shifts in the MVP mid-project, which required rethinking core functionality, user flows, and the overall roadmap.
Aligned with multiple stakeholder groups across design, brand, product, and business (on both sides, Disney and Dapper) each with differing priorities.
Due to overlap restrictions with Disney’s games team, we had to gamify the experience without actually creating a game, striking a careful balance between playfulness and platform integrity.

Research

To design an experience that felt intuitive, emotional, and grounded in fandom, I conducted research across physical pin trading culture, Web3 audience behavior, and leading digital collectible platforms.

Key insights that shaped the design:

I conducted contextual research on pin trading at Disney parks to better understand the rituals and motivations that fans associate with collecting. This helped shape my focus on personalization, storytelling, and display.
Platforms like OpenSea and Rarible offered core marketplace functionality but lacked warmth or narrative connection. I didn’t want to create another stock market, and this solidified the goal to create something that felt expressive and human, not just transactional.
In partnership with Dapper, we also explored Web3 audience data and found our audience skewed male, 20s–30s, tech-savvy, and design-conscious. This called for a visual that should look sleek and premium, with a bit of Disney playfulness.

Exploring the world of pin trading

Collectible platforms

Role & Process

Since this was a platform being built from scratch, I focused on grounding the product in emotional storytelling, UX clarity, and fandom expression. The newness of the platform also meant we had to appeal to casual fans and hardcore collectors.

Directed the brand identity
- Designed the logo and led art direction in partnership with Dapper. I aimed for a look that was sleek, premium, and slightly futuristic, clear enough for mainstream audiences but cool enough to appeal to Web3-native collectors. I also oversaw iconography and UI.
Pushed for social storytelling features
- Proposed features like user profiles with collecting origin stories, ownership history for each pin, and easy ways to share collections on social platforms. My goal was to make the experience feel expressive. Collectors take pride not only in the items they’ve collected throughout their lives, but also in the careful ways they care for and display their collections to themselves and others. Being able to flex the pin collections was very important to me. The ability to share to social media meant their pin stories would live beyond the app.
Defined the pin value system
- Collaborated closely with the product team to define how rarity, categorization, and discoverability would work. With over 100 years of IP, and an obsessive collector fanbase, it was essential to create a system that felt rich. In the physical pin trading world, value comes from material qualities, thickness, IP represented, size, set affiliation, etc. With digital collectibles, we really had to invent new markers of value that would feel just as exciting. Some follow the traditional cues like thickness or material look, and others offer novelty through unlocking historical scenes from Disney movies, or digitally changing into an alternate colorway.
- This thinking also inspired my push for a premium unboxing experience. If users couldn’t hold the pins, they needed to feel the thrill in other ways. I directed the creative approach to the unboxing experience to ensure it felt premium. While Dapper created the core assets, I provided ongoing feedback and art direction, guiding how animations should look, feel, and unfold. It was important to me to entice replayability through a magical unboxing experience that they would look forward to each time they buy a pin.
Brought the physical into the digital
- To echo the tactile joy of pin trading, I directed a layout approach where users could freely arrange digital pins on velvet mats, mirroring how fans display and collect in the real world. The texture, structure, and interaction model were inspired directly by how fans trade pins at the parks.
Balanced product evolution with brand integrity
- As the MVP shifted mid-project, I worked to adapt the experience without compromising usability. Each change required rethinking flows and hierarchy while maintaining Disney’s standards for storytelling and quality.

Visual direction

Limited edition with video offering

Testing

During early testing, we noticed users were dropping off shortly after launching the app. This didn’t surprise me since Pinnacle is a brand-new product in a nascent space, and the experience could feel overwhelming without context.

I proposed adding onboarding screens to help ground users in what the platform was, how it worked, and why it mattered. While I didn’t design the screens myself (those were handled by Dapper’s dev team), I directed the content strategy and flow, ensuring we emphasized value up front and kept things simple, digestible, and fan-focused.

Reflections

I’m proud of how much trust was placed in me, and how much of my thinking lives in the product, from the overall branding down to the tiniest detail of pin presentation.
That said, it wasn’t always smooth. One of the biggest challenges was balancing speed with quality. Our business partners wanted to move quickly (understandably, Web3 moves fast), but with Disney, every asset, interaction, and screen has to meet incredibly high standards and go through multiple layers of approval. That tension meant I often had to advocate for design that protected the integrity of the brand, even when timelines were tight.
Because this wasn’t just about using our IP, it was about representing it, every touchpoint had to feel intentional, and worthy of the Disney name. That tension is real, and learning how to navigate it with clarity and care is a skill I’ll carry into every project moving forward.