Product Designer

The design work here is mostly rules: patterns that still hold when the system is far too large for anyone to keep in their head, decided with people spread across the world and several time zones. A good deal of it is AI tooling I build myself — plugins, prototypes, whatever removes a week of dragging rectangles — so design moves at the pace engineering does.

Millions of people, real money, and numbers that have to mean exactly one thing. The design system the whole platform runs on was mine to shape, and I was directly responsible for seven-plus products built from it — including some of the most profitable ones.

A bank's public site is where people arrive worried, and every wrong turn becomes a call to a support line that is already full. I designed the product pages, the campaigns and the home page, and structured the site so business customers had a route through it as well as individuals — then did the same again for OTP Leasing.

An ATM has no hover, no scroll and no second chance to explain. The bank's guidelines had nothing in them that moved, so before animating anything we had to establish the vocabulary — what the shapes are, how they arrive, how long one is allowed to hold the screen — and keep it recognisably Postbank while doing it. Then thirteen-plus screen animations and a set of screensavers that show what the machine can do before anyone touches it, each built to crop cleanly across every size of screen in the estate.

They arrived with a straightforward request: teach us design systems and Figma. The part that actually mattered was the one nobody ships in a component library — the rules. A system is not a set of components; it is the patterns, the naming and the conventions that decide whether four people build the same screen the same way, and it governs the experience long after anyone remembers who drew the button. So we sorted out their files, then the process between design, development and management, and then they stopped needing me.

Mostly product design, mostly on systems, for the best developers I have worked with — which is how I ended up writing a fair amount of the frontend too. We built the internal libraries and the practices around them, including one made of single-property utility classes: you configure the design system up front, it stays in step with the Figma file, and a new project is moving on day one. Tailwind turned up later on the same idea, which was equal parts flattering and annoying.

Two years, a great many projects, and a studio that kept winning web awards. A1, Vivacom, DSK Bank, Postbank, BNP Paribas, Fibank, Centio, Jump, the National Culture Fund, Sofia Record Factory, Emerald Travel, Doris — telecoms, banks and cultural institutions, one after the next. What stuck was not a technique. It was the standard: the assumption that the last ten percent is the job, not the part you get to when the schedule allows.