Sticker border effects are one of the effects within PicCollage, a photo-editing app that has drawn over 200M+ downloads. The effects allows user to add decorative border around their photos.
I led the effect team to design the borders from the start, including building up a reusable system, designing the graphics, and shipping the product with engineers.
Users have been fond of the border effects since launch, and kept requesting new styles. But building each style from scratch was slow, as every new effect needed its own structure built from the ground up. So instead of designing one-off styles, we aimed to build a reusable system that could support future border effects with far less repeated work. The system also needed to work across all kinds of photos and shapes, which shaped how I approached the research.
To explore potential directions, I looked at collage examples on Pinterest and browsed how PicCollage users were arranging their own collages in the Facebook group. I noticed a pattern: collage makers enjoyed arranging graphics around the photo cutout itself. Since the appeal was in the arrangement, I saw an opportunity to build a border style around flexible placement, one that could stay versatile across different assets and apply to all sorts of collage creations.
With this direction in mind, I started listing out parameters and worked with developers to define the border effect system. Because the appeal came from how graphics were arranged, the system needed to control placement and variation directly — so we built in parameters for padding, spacing, sizing, and randomness, letting new styles be generated by adjusting these values instead of building a new structure each time.
During the development, engineers and I worked through several tech issues - We noticed that some assets were directional (e.g. arrows, text), so wrapping them around the photo could leave them pointing the wrong way. We also have tested edge cases, including very narrow images and cutouts with sharp edges to make sure our system held up across a range of conditions.
We shipped this feature in 4 weeks, with 5 initial styles designed by me and other designers on the team. After launch, we delivered 2 more styles using the same system with no extra development time, demonstrating that the reusable system met its original goal. The feature has driven 600+ subscription conversions since its release in April 2026.
