Ivo Zhelev in a black t-shirt with one hand raised, as if presenting the empty image placeholder where his head should be
An empty image placeholder where his head should be: a grey box with crossed diagonals and four corner handles.

Product Designer

10y of experience

I work on what a product is made of — the rules it holds together by, and whether they still hold at the hundredth screen.

As part of Voidweb

Most products don't need more features. They need someone responsible for the whole.

Design has never been easier to produce, and good design has never been rarer. Tools got faster, libraries got bigger, and a competent-looking screen now takes minutes. What that speed hides is the part that was always hard: deciding what should exist, and what shouldn't.

How I work

The user is the whole test

Not my taste, not the technique, not what would photograph well. It is the one question I let decide things, and it holds even when the answer is not what I would have chosen for myself.

  1. The question comes first now

    For years the order was the other way round: make the thing, then ask whether it was any good for whoever has to use it. Now I do not start without knowing who that person is and what they would actually find better. Most of the argument disappears once that is decided early rather than late.

  2. Simple is the expensive one

    Keeping something simple is close to a mania for me — how much sits on a page, how many decisions land in one place, how much a person can hold at once. It is the harder of the two options every time: sharper judgement, and thinking pushed further than adding another option would ever ask for.

  3. A company is a context to be gathered

    Nothing big gets made alone. Everyone in a company is carrying something nobody else has, and none of them has to be right for it to be worth having — the way a model is only as good as what it has been given. Working through a team is how you widen your own context, and what comes out the other side is thought through on levels I could not have reached by myself.

  4. Tools decide how much of the work you get to do

    People say the tools do not matter. They do. Where speed is the constraint, tooling sets both how much you deliver and how good it is — you can have the ideas, the principles and the eye, and still ship peanuts next to what the same day would have produced without the bottleneck. So I build my own when there is one.

Experience

Ten years of things that had to work

Product design for banks, for a crypto platform used by millions, and for global enterprises — all of it in production, all of it still running. Each story here tells one engagement straight: what I owned, the call that mattered, and what it taught me.

VoidwebCurrentProduct DesignerOngoing · Enterprise platform
01 / 07
A steel and glass atrium roof seen from below, its braces crossing at the centre

At the forefront of AI

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

Read more
Owned
Systems, patterns and their rules, plus the tooling and working prototypes around them.
Challenge
The product itself: enormous, genuinely complicated, with many moving parts that must keep agreeing.
Decision
Most of my workflow is rebuilt around AI: tooling now, not features to await.
Learned
At this size a working prototype settles an argument no amount of presenting will.
Nexo, with OblikProduct Designer2 years · 7+ products
02 / 07
Ivo's ability to dive deep into every detail, combined with his strong technical knowledge, makes him stand out as a professional. Working with him is not only a pleasure but also a valuable experience that benefits any team or project he is involved in.
Todor LichevLead Product Designer, Oblik
A glass facade reflecting the building opposite it

Every product had to feel like one

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.

Read more
Owned
Design system components, motion, dark mode, and the day-to-day line between design and development.
Challenge
Understanding the financial instruments down to their maths and data structures before designing anything.
Decision
Invest in the system first, so correctness stops needing a designer on every screen.
Impact
One recognisable product across every team, at a scale measured in millions of users.
DSK BankWeb DesignerVia StudioX · Public site + OTP Leasing
03 / 07
The steel underside of a modern building meeting a glass grid, near monochrome

Designing the front door of a bank

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 for OTP Leasing.

Read more
Owned
Product and campaign pages, headers, home page and information architecture across two bank sites.
Challenge
No design until I understood each product end to end, and what customers expect.
Decision
Sit with the product managers first and the marketers second. Figma came last.
Learned
How to make a decision easy: tiers, comparisons, the one number someone shops on.
PostbankMotion DesignerVia StudioX · 13+ ATM screens
04 / 07
A woven lattice ceiling curving into a circular skylight

The guidelines had nothing that moved

An ATM has no hover, no scroll, no second chance to explain. The guidelines had nothing that moved, so before animating anything we had to set the vocabulary — shapes, how they arrive, how long one may hold the screen — kept recognisably Postbank. Then thirteen-plus screen animations, and screensavers showing what the machine can do before anyone touches it.

Read more
Owned
The visual and motion vocabulary, then thirteen-plus screen animations and the idle screensavers.
Challenge
Brand guidelines with nothing moving, and screen sizes every composition had to survive.
Decision
Design the movement system up front; each screen was an application, not an invention.
Learned
Motion earns most where an interface is least forgiving — not on marketing sites.
eDynamixDesign systems consultant6 months · Consulting
05 / 07
Ivo is a pleasure to work with, he helped us with valuable advice in organizing our design system. Very well organized and creative.
Nick BelchevDirector, Operations & Revenue, eDynamix
A modular building facade, one geometry repeating

Teaching a team to run its own design system

They asked: teach us design systems and Figma. A system is not its components — it is the patterns, naming and 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. We sorted out their files, then their process, and they stopped needing me.

Read more
Owned
Advice and teaching: system structure, their Figma practice, process between design, development and management.
Challenge
Adoption, always. A system is a social artefact before a technical one.
Decision
Optimise for whoever joins in six months, not for the presentation at the end.
Learned
A system that needs its author present is not a system yet.
SoftadevProduct Designer4 years · 6 projects
06 / 07
Ivo is a UX wizard! We worked together on several SaaS projects, and he always delivered stunning and intuitive designs.
Yoan MarinovFounder & CEO, Softadev
A stack of identical steel tubes seen end on, their cut rims catching the light

A utility-first CSS library, before that was a thing

Mostly product design, mostly on systems, for the best developers I have worked with — I ended up writing a fair amount of frontend. We built internal libraries and practices around them, including one made of single-property utility classes that get projects moving on day one. Tailwind turned up later on the same idea — equal parts flattering and annoying.

Read more
Owned
Product design across six projects, their systems, and a real share of the frontend.
Challenge
Same-week design and build, without the design quietly becoming whatever was easiest to code.
Decision
Put the design system in CSS — single-property utilities, configured once, synced with Figma.
Learned
Working close to engineering is the fastest cure for designing what cannot be built.
StudioXDesigner2 years · 20+ projects
07 / 07
Ivo combines exceptional UX/UI expertise with a creative approach, backed by perseverance, dedication, and outstanding communication skills. Working with him is both productive and enjoyable, making him a key contributor to any successful project.
Georgi LinkovCreative Director, StudioX
Steel braces crossing in a great X against a concrete and brick wall

The years that set the bar

A great many projects and a studio that kept winning web awards. Telecoms, banks, cultural institutions: A1, Vivacom, DSK Bank, Postbank, BNP Paribas, Fibank, Centio, Jump, the National Culture Fund, Sofia Record Factory, Emerald Travel, Doris. What stuck wasn't a technique but the standard: the last ten percent is the job, not what you get to when the schedule allows.

Read more
Owned
Identity, interface and interaction work across twenty-plus client projects.
Challenge
Every few weeks a new industry, vocabulary and idea of what good looks like.
Learned
Speed and craft aren't opposites. Craft is what's left when you can't start over.

Community

Cukam Ne6ta

A community in Stara Zagora for makers and curious people — meeting up, showing work, and building something out of it. In progress, opening later this year.

An evening at Cukam Ne6ta: people around a laptop, talking
Включи се

A room for people who make things, so that being outside the capital does not mean working out everything alone.

The point is to keep each other on the front edge of it — the tools that keep changing, the skills worth sharpening, work shown before it is finished and put to a room that will argue with it. And to teach: a lot of what happens here is aimed at the people coming up behind us.

What comes up

  • design
  • AI
  • workshops
  • design jams
  • seminars
  • showing work
  • creative tools
  • learning out loud

It is being built now and opens later this year. It is for anyone who makes things, and being early in your career is a reason to come rather than a reason to wait.

Read about the meetup

Visit the site

If you're building something that matters, I'd like to hear about it.

LinkedIn is where I keep up with work conversations — a message there reaches me, and I answer.

Worth a conversation

  • Product design
  • Design systems
  • Startups
  • Consulting
  • Mentoring
  • Collaborations
  • Speaking
  • Community work

Based in Stara Zagora, Bulgaria — working with teams anywhere.

Ivo Zhelev