The name said film pre-vis. The community made comics. The product had no category. Eight weeks to close the gap.
§ B · Outcomes
After hero rewrite + IA simplification (12 → 5 nav items).
New homepage vs. legacy "Storyboarder" landing.
Median days from application to first completed scene.
Within two weeks of launch.
Twelve hundred creators were staging 3D scenes daily. Publicly, Sumugi barely existed. Five interlocked problems blocked every growth path: the name pointed at the wrong industry, the funnel had never decided who it was for, the product was being sold as software when the actual value was the community forming around it, the whole thing occupied a category with no analogues, and the site looked like every other SaaS product — invisible to the visual creators it was trying to recruit.
"Storyboarder" is a film pre-production job title. Real users were comic creators — manga writers, VRoid artists, indie storytellers. Recruiters, film students, and the actual audience all landed on the same page and saw three different products.
The product could grow by attracting people who make comics or by attracting people who read them. These are different funnels, different messaging architectures, different definitions of success. Without a committed answer, the site tried to serve both and converted neither.
The 3D workspace is the tool. The community of creators making work no one thought was possible — that's the product. Positioning as software commoditizes it against Clip Studio and Krita. Positioning as community makes it irreplaceable.
"It's like X but for Y" didn't exist. No shorthand, no adjacent product a potential user already understood. Before we could sell anything, we had to make the concept legible — convince someone with no 3D experience that they could make a finished panel in an afternoon.
The legacy site looked interchangeable with any SaaS product — clean, neutral, forgettable. For a tool whose entire promise is visual storytelling, that was a credibility problem. No visual creator joins a community that doesn't look like it belongs to creators.
Trademark-clear, two syllables, phonetically stable across languages.
Readers follow creators; the funnel starts with makers, not consumers.
"Here's what people made" outperforms "here's what the tool does."
Measured via unmoderated tests — pass rate target ≥ 10 / 12.
Measured against legacy site over a 14-day rolling window.
Waitlist silence was the biggest retention leak.
Eight weeks left no room for academic research. We ran a tight, mixed-methods program weighted toward conversations with people who already paid us in time — beta users — plus a lexical study to keep naming on rails across markets.
The Indie Writer
32 · Brooklyn
"I have 80,000 words and zero drawing skill. I just want to see my scenes."
Needs
Pains
The VRoid Artist
24 · Osaka
"My VRoid model is everything. I need to pose her, light her, and ship a panel a day."
Needs
Pains
The Hobbyist Storyteller
28 · Austin
"I need to make six panels in an hour, not six hours."
Needs
Pains
The pivot
“Sell the community's output — not the tool that produced it.”
Fourteen beta-user calls produced one consistent signal: people described their goal as "make a comic," never "use a 3D workspace." And every time they showed us their work, they showed us the panel — the artifact that already circulated on Twitter and Discord. The insight was that Sumugi's most powerful marketing asset was already being made by its users every day. We rebuilt the homepage and IA around that output: community gallery above the fold, creator personas as navigation anchors, feature tabs framed as workflow phases rather than tool specs. The tool exists, but it never introduces itself.
Legacy Storyboarder funnel
sumugi.com — 9-day path to first scene
12 nav items collapsed to 3 verbs and 8 destinations. The IA reads left-to-right as a workflow: Make → See → Join.
Before
Storyboarder
After
to weave · to spin a thread into cloth. Short, ownable, phonetically stable across English, Japanese, and European markets. A new-category product can't afford a name that locks it to a feature — "ComicMaker3D" would have dated it before it shipped. Sumugi implies craft and assembly without claiming territory it doesn't own yet. The weaving metaphor arrived pre-loaded: users already described their work as building a story panel by panel.
Final wordmark set in Megazoid. Lowercase only — a quiet brand that lets the comics do the shouting.
#7E31F2
Electric violet
Primary brand · CTAs
#6F15F0
Deep violet
Hover · pressed states
#4F0CBB
Ink violet
Backgrounds · hero wash
#F231F2
Ultra magenta
Accent · mascot highlight
#F2E531
Signal yellow
Alerts · new-feature ribbon
Display
Megazoid
Display + logomark. Bubbly, dimensional, comic-native — the shape of the product in a single typeface.
Body
Storyboarder Sans
UI + body. Custom variable sans by Charles Forman — neutral at 400, punchy at 800, stays out of Megazoid's way.
01 · Hero
Before
After
Replaced tool-feature headline ("Make Comics without drawing!") with creator-identity positioning ("Visual Storytelling for Everyone"). Added Megazoid wordmark, film-grain texture, and invite-only competition banner — signaling community exclusivity over feature demonstration. The old hero positioned the product; the new one recruits a specific identity.
02 · Feature Demo
Before
After
Applied Megazoid to section headings and introduced hard drop-shadows with -1.85° rotation to the product screenshot. The original section was visually indistinguishable from any SaaS tool — vanilla typography, flat screenshot. The tilt and shadow system embeds the brand aesthetic directly into the feature demonstration.
03 · Audience
Before
After
Collapsed four audience categories to three, reordered to surface Comic Creators first, and replaced flat grid cards with angled asymmetric layout. Removed the "versatile platform for every storyteller" framing — a hedge that diluted creator-first positioning. Fewer categories, cleaner hierarchy.
04 · Testimonials
Before
After
Restructured social proof from a low-contrast dark utility section to white cards with hard 16px violet drop shadows. Creator names in hot pink (#F231F2) read as attribution rather than metadata. The original buried community proof in the same visual register as every other section — the new treatment makes it unmissable.
05 · Community CTA
Before
After
Added the Sumugi chonk mascot as an emotional anchor above the headline. Placed Discord and Studio CTAs at equal visual weight — treating community entry as equivalent to product entry. The old version framed Discord as secondary; this one signals that the community is the front door.
06 · Made with Sumugi
Before
After
Promoted community-created content from a plain card grid to a showcase with hot pink drop shadows and violet creator attribution. The original "Check out these cool stories" framing positioned the gallery as supplementary. The new layout treats creator output as the primary hero — consistent with the research finding that the gallery drove 2.6× higher return visits than feature-led layouts.
We led with the workspace because it's technically impressive. But people didn't come back for the renderer — they came back to see what others had made. Moving the gallery above the fold beat every feature-led layout by 2.6×.
9 of 12 people went blank when we said "3D workspace for 2D comics." A 6-second autoplay of a finished panel — no text — got 11 of 12 to describe it correctly.
The old site was clean and completely forgettable. The Megazoid wordmark, electric violet, film-grain — all of it said "we care what things look like." Design without a point of view recruits no one in particular.
§ Product · the creation tool
Conceptual user flow · core task, not shipped screens