I build the operating
environment for creative work.

Creative Operations & Studio Leadership. Creative judgment. Systems architecture. Teams made more capable. AI-enabled, with human judgment at the center.

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15 of 15

The brief decides
where the work goes.

New CreativePM pre-review
before WrikeIdeation

Studio execution

Project ExecutionApproved direction

Change OrderPre-approved templates

Reconstructed from the September 2025 studio intake model · Explanatory

Work lived in silos. I built the studio that replaced them.

Sur La Table · Maker's Studio

Every send is assembled,
not started from scratch.

TemplatesA tier ladder, and the brief itself built as a component

ModulesNine families, with one-offs fenced off from the governed set

Foundations19 primitives in 5 groups, 20 semantic colour roles, 22 type styles in 6 role folders

In the first real week, 27 sends were assembled entirely from it.

Published 2026-08-11; test build 23–29 August
From the library’s own Status and QC record

I verified my own work. That was the bug.

Sur La Table · Email Design System

A real source.
A reusable system.

Real foodChef-prepared source
Captured sourcePhotographer + practitioner
Reusable pantryPreserved source library
AI compositionPractitioner-led method
Human reviewApproval before customer use

Jin Mi: concept, authenticity constraint and governance.
Culinary Ops: capture principle. Practitioner: method and operations.

Explanatory illustration · Real sources, AI-assisted composition, human approval

The image problem was reaching back into the recipe.

Sur La Table · Virtual Pantry

Food and pantry packaging in a kitchen environment.

Creative direction by Jin Mi · Photography by an external agency

A standard for eleven departments, with the exceptions written in.

Sur La Table · Packaging Standard

~297items

69folders

8category sources

Sur La Table signage source inventory
Explanatory reconstruction

~297 items became eight sources — and other designers now extend them.

Sur La Table · Signage

Digital production
moves into Figma.

* October estimated

Sur La Table digital production · 2025
November excludes repeat projects · Explanatory

Digital production hit 100% Figma adoption a year ahead of plan, with no mandate.

Sur La Table · Figma Adoption

Every document is built
and audited before review.

54 / 54build PASS

54 / 54audit PASS

0records with issues

< 0.7%round-trip pixel deviation

Deviation measured on four deliberately worst-case stores.

From the existing audit_report.json record · Store identifiers redacted
Automated success precedes human approval · Explanatory

54 store-specific documents, generated and audited automatically — and still approved by hand.

Sur La Table · Private Event Packet

Coverage without erasing specialty.

Specialist workflow↓Cross-trained team coverage
Production lane↓Cross-trained coverage
Solo lane↓Expanded team capability

Documented through April 2026 · Historical, role-based explanation

Coverage without erasing specialty: each with a team behind it.

Sur La Table · Dynamic Resourcing

Creative direction by Jin Mi · Photography by an external agency

Every image had a defined job before anyone picked up a camera.

Sur La Table · Product Photography

Holiday confection packaging, 2025: tins, boxes, tubes and bags.

Lettering by Mary Kate McDevitt · Packaging creative direction by Jin Mi · Photo art direction by Sarah Hunter

The program's signature asset was someone else's work, and I kept it that way.

Sur La Table · Holiday / Peppermint Bark

Existing photography integrated with the global red and gold visual direction.

Original photography and design: an external agency · Global red/gold assets: Shiseido HQ · Integration/remediation: Jin Mi

No reshoot budget. The creative decision was what to preserve.

Shiseido · Remediation

Launch specification for the brand store: the hero slot defined by size, format, option count and placement rule, with candidate options laid out against it. The specification and the review structure are Jin Mi's; the imagery is the brand's own.

A prestige beauty launch that had to stay prestige across 1,500+ assets.

Clé de Peau Beauté · Amazon Luxury Stores

Color foundations board: a rules block requiring colors to be picked from semantic roles rather than raw primitives, a set of primitive swatches grouped by family, and a table of semantic roles for text, surface, state and overlay, each mapped for light and dark.

Color architecture: raw primitives kept separate from named semantic roles, each mapped for light and dark, with the usage rule stated on the board.

I built the foundation once, so the next workflow would not need its own.

Sur La Table · Figma Systems

Page content
Final creative checkpoint
Frontend production environment
BoundaryPublishingEcommerce

Owner-confirmed role boundary · Explanatory

I learned the CMS well enough to build the pages myself, and stopped there.

Sur La Table · Web Production

WonderPlan on a phone: the Insights screen showing all-time spend, trip counts and a yearly category breakdown, beside sixteen versions of the theme picker, one per colour theme.

WonderPlan, an independent build: one product rule carried across sixteen themes. Figures are synthetic.

A hit area declared at 44 pixels rendered at 24.5, and only measuring caught it.

Independent · WonderPlan

I build the operating environment for creative work.