Blog – Johan Ronsse

“Designing” in the browser

May 17, 2025 - Posted in conference process rant

I watched this Beyond tellerand talk by Matthias Ott and it really made me think. So much that I wrote this long blog post.

This is a bit of a niche rant that will only interest a very specific audience, but I wrote it, so I might as well publish it. Lately I’ve been having too much blog posts sitting in draft.

First of all, kudos to Marc Thiele for organising Beyond Tellerand all these years and for putting all the talks online. Very nice.

Now, about Matthias’s talk. I feel this talk could have been given 5 years ago.

Yes, the browser is the true grain – if you only consider the browser as a deployment target.

But design tools these days like Figma and Framer are gravitating towards supporting a visual environment to work with that grain. This talk is more or less ignoring that.

While I don’t disagree with the message to design and explore in the browser, Matthias is kind of ignoring that design tools are constantly evolving towards how the web works.

The standard way these talks seem to go is saying “haha Figma” “why a static picture?” and then showing designing in the browser as the way of the light.

I think that’s a very narrow view on design and creation.

These talks tend to mix up design and implementation completely. These talks are not talking about design – i.e. solving a problem in a visual manner through exploration and iteration. They are talking about implementation.

Talks like this forget that the process of web development where you are writing code and refreshing a browser hundreds of times to see what you are doing is not creation. It’s implementation.

The manipulation is indirect, which leads to highly uncreative results. One of my favorite conference talks is Inventing on principle.

In a way it’s difficult to compare this talk to Matthias’s talk, but it also talks about creation, and one of the points is that you need to be able to directly manipulate what you are creating in order to make good decisions. In a way, a fluid typography example in the browser that works across breakpoints is exactly that.

I miss some of that when I am designing in Figma. But when I am designing a fluid type scale, I am designing a very narrow slice of the whole thing I am designing.

Most examples shown in these kinds of talks are just implementation things. I’ve seen a type fluid scale and a subgrid a 100 times before. I did some of this in 2010 with Sass. I mean, they are good examples for beginners. And it’s good that there are better ways to do the same in 2025. But don’t try to posit that the web is the design tool.

It’s a way to visualize certain things that are a bit ahead of what traditional design tools can do.

While this talk is well-intentioned, and for any beginner designer it would be good to watch what Matthias is talking about and learn all the front-end techniques mentioned, this type of talk in my opinion fundamentally misunderstands what design really is.

This type of talk tries to posit that you can design in a browser and does it by showing a bunch of tech demos.

The reality is that you can’t actually design in a browser.

You can put things together, you can make disparate experiments, but in my opinion you will always need a free canvas to explore and iterate in a meaningful way.

You will need go through the design process, which has lots of bits and pieces and possibilities, where likely at some point you want to bring things alive in various ways – going towards a prototype. And that can be at any time in the process.

One of the great ways to make things alive could be an HTML/CSS prototype – but usually this is at the point that you already know what you are making (or you are iterating with AI, but that’s a whole other blog post 🤓).

It’s rather rare to see the act of creation truly happening from scratch in the browser. Who can really do that – and what are they making that is not an implementation of an idea created elsewhere?

In what Matthias is showing — fluid type scales, color logic with okclh, subgrid demos — in my opinion you are past design at this point – you are in the implementation world. This is a different world.

Many of the talk givers have roots in either web standards or accessibility. They work for browser vendors or as consultants have a vested interest in continuing to do what they do the way they do it.

If Figma, Framer of whatever design tool upends their job, it’s painful for them. If Framer ships a carousel component that makes every carousel on every Framer website accessible, there’s nothing more to report in an accessibility report.

If Figma Sites can generate the code that they like to write by hand, there is no selling of front-end development anymore. The reality I foresee is that something like Figma Sites and Framer will be used for small marketing sites, and at some point a big company outgrows that — and of course there is a need for real front-end development then.

My theory is that tools upending someone’s jobs gives them an almost visceral reaction to complain against the tool, not because it’s necessarily bad, but because it threatens their livelihood. I’ve seen a similar reaction to Figma’s AI features last year from designers themselves and it’s a bit funny to see the same thing this year.

Now it’s the front-enders and accessibility people that have their pitchforks up. The reaction to Figma Sites last week was especially stupid.

65 000 people watched Kevin Powell’s video taken from a livestream where 500 people gave a thumbs up to Kevin where Kevin thinks he is fighting the good fight.

But his whole video misses the point that you can set a custom tag in Figma. He complains about non-semantic div soup but he just simply missed one of Figma’s features. I feel like he should issue a bit of a correction to his audience.

He also gives an explanation to his massive audience about aria-label that fundamentally misunderstands how aria-label works. It subsumes the content that’s inside, it doesn’t lead to duplicate reading of the content. I respect Kevin and his CSS teachings, but maybe he needs to read up on accessibility before making points like that?

People like Matthias Ott and his friend Matuzo then go on and applaud that kind of “haha” about the code that Figma sites generates. This part is in Mattias’s talk as well.

They go on and complain about the code structure that devs use today. Then they make a vague point about the cascade with references from when HTML and CSS was invented and then go on that the web was never meant this way. I’m sorry but that’s just repeating things that Jeremy Keith said 10 years ago without providing anything new.

You could clip in 10 minutes from an old Jeremy Keith talk into this talk and it would be exactly the same talk.

Maybe I am just getting old but I wanted to be presented with new information. Conferences are supposed to provide some new info, that take the current world into account, not regurgitate old stuff. Yeah, there is cascade in cascading style sheets.

And unfortunately the world has discovered that seemingly doesn’t seem to work for them and they gravitated towards Tailwind and component-scoped styles.

I also don’t like a gazillion Tailwind or typical CSS in JS output, and I’ve tried to fight the good fight against Tailwind (see this post and there’s many more if you search).

But on Tailwind, I’ve accepted it as something that people do. I can’t fight it anymore, because it’s become an accepted way of working.

These days I am more results-focussed: it it accessible? Is it performant? I won’t complain about the code structure, only about the result.

Look at X.com: if you look at the code if you open the browser dev tools you might have CSS in JS nightmares. But it’s one of the most performant and usable web apps out there for me. That’s what I am evaluating. (Now the Mastodon crowd will ready their pitchforks that I am still on X…)

Design tools are constantly evolving towards how the web works.

Check out how Framer is evolving for example. Framer has included rem font sizing since 2 weeks. Figma implemented aspect ratio for images since a few months. Figma just shipped grid at Config last week.

Through variables Figma can simulate dark/light mode in a visual environment. You can easily export those values to code for usage in the browser. If Figma ships okclh tomorrow, the argument of Matthias’s talk kind of disappears.

My point of view is that the shipping of features in design tools that correlate to browser features has been happening for years and is something that’s an absolute enabler for people to create.

Figma especially goes out of their way to make the primitive base of what they make transportable to the web. The engineers behind the new Figma draw went to great lengths to make sure the new dynamic stroke logic is exportable to SVG (see this tweet).

Then why bash them so much? They are doing engineering things that don’t even come close to the level of most consultant’s daily work.

Yet all they get is bashing from a specific community that doesn’t bother to fully evaluate the tool, then reacts to wrong information because it fits their world perspective. That’s confirmation bias in action.

The design tools are gravitating towards the CSS tech, and they do 90% of what you need in most projects anyway, so what’s the big point of taking a stance on designing in the browser?

Matthias says “CSS is the most powerful design tool for the web.” No, it’s the most powerful implementation tool.

The tech mentioned in the slides about CSS features is rather niche; most of what we needed was implemented between 2010 to 2020 in CSS.

Yet that slide is used as a main argument that designing in the browser is so much better of a design app.

What I mostly see are a bunch of technicalities. Yes, the browser has :where and :has but that’s just about selecting the right elements. That’s unrelated to design.

Sure, there’s a popover API now that half works: but I’ve implemented popovers since forever in my apps. And I could go on and give a similar example for everything on that slide (@supports etc.). As I said earlier in this post, this is implementation, not design.

The extras that we are getting now on the web are mostly just a bonus and not fundamental. I can do just fine with hex colours.

The problem in most of my projects is NOT the color scale. It’s apps that are broken for users on a UX level. If I would make a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for the apps I design, implementing okclh sits at the very top of the triangle.

During a certain part of the talk Matthias is showing us a color palette implemented in okclh. He is saying that this stuff is only possible to explore in the browser, where you are “painting with the web”. That’s a very narrow view.

First of all in the color blog post he is admiring, the tools showing the visualization were most likely not even written with web tech. They were done with all kinds of low-level tools and then converted to web code to visualize on the web. Yet Matthias paints a picture that this is ideation on the web.

I did similar work using a combination of Figma and scripting to map lightness scales to a uniform color space. Using python and chatgpt to get to a color ramp that is uniform (with hex). It was a pain – and I do agree that it’s nice to set up a color scale in okclh() directly in the browser.

Let’s say you are in a design project and you have to work with those colours, then it’s a bit lame that when you go back to design work in Figma, where you then have to recreate an incomplete picture. I agree in that sense that designing with static pictures doesn’t work — a main point of the talk — when the actual implementation target has different capabilities.

But once again, first of all the things he is talking about are quite niche, and next thing we know, Figma implements okclh(), and the argument that the design is a static picture that doesn’t represent the dev reality disappears.

Right now, we are evolving towards a situation where you can create what you used to need code for in a visual tool in an easy manner. For a certain kind of project — a small marketing site — you can skip the front-end development phase and go directly to these tools. Figma Sites is in beta and will likely evolve fast over the coming year. Framer is already usable today for this use case.

You can now hit publish in Framer to get to a real, high-end, responsive website with great fluid typography. I know this because we made a marketing site for a client with Obra just a few weeks ago and it took us way less time than it used to. I tested it for accessibility with Voiceover on my phone and it works just fine.

There is no bothersome front-end repo to maintain; no difficult CMS implementations. Just a visual tool and a publish button. In my mind, this is the future, where you pay a vendor to handle the annoying, repeated implementation parts for you.

Some of the crowd I follow om Mastodon would rather live in a world where they hand-code every detail. I think that’s fine from a craft perspective, and excellent for teaching, but a bit naive in the real world.

Anyway, that’s my perspective. In no way do I want to attack Matthias, I think it’s an excellent talk. I just find that he doesn’t use the work design in the right way, he is talking about implementation experiments in the browser. He also ignores how the design tools are growing towards the grain of the web, dismissing them with a static picture argument that was true in 2012, but not in 2025.
Deze week

May 6, 2025 - Posted in agency-life build-in-public obra-studio ondernemen

Deze week ben ik nog eens in België. Ik reis een paar keer per jaar tussen België en Mexico, en mijn primair doel van de laatste twee trips was werkgerelateerd.

Ik ben bezig met de opbouw van Obra Studio en telkens ik in België ben is het goed om klanten in het echt te zien, om af te spreken met nieuwe collega’s en natuurlijk daarnaast toch nog even tijd nemen voor familie en vrienden.

Wij zijn ondertussen met een team van 4 aan de slag aan allerhande projecten. We bereiken bijna de €100 000 verkochte omzet, waar ik blij om ben.

Als eigenaar van een agency heb ik altijd een beetje schrik van “de zomer”. In juli ligt België nogal plat, en dan heb je maar beter je projecten verkocht. Ik ben blij dat dat grotendeels het geval is en we veilig en met voldoende werk de zomer doorkomen.

Vorige week maandag starte een nieuwe collega, en kwamen we samen in een co-working space om te praten over de eerste projecten.

Vandaag heb ik een Figma workshop, waar ik 2 designers les zal geven in Figma. Eén van de uitdagingen is controle nemen over een door een agency aangeleverd design systeem.

Tegelijk leveren wij als agency ook systemen op en is er intern het gesprek gestart wat de exacte kwaliteitsnorm is van zo’n oplevering.

Ik praate met een goeie vriend die als design manager werkt bij een scale-up, en ik deed hem uit de doeken waarom ik zo hou van een agency. Ik hou van de uitdagende opdrachten, van verplicht te worden creatief uit de hoek te komen (zeker als het werk niet automagisch binnenkomt zoals dit jaar!); ik hou van de duidelijkheid van, dat als er een project is, je een afspraak maakt over wat er moet gebeuren en dat uitvoert. Je zit niet te wachten op momentum in een design project, je hoeft het niet te forceren: de noodzaak is er al via het project.

Vanavond nog een verkoopsmeeting in Brussel, en een afspraak met een potentiële business partner.

Mischien is het omdat ik al lang beweeg in agencies, maar ik voel me als een vis in het water.

Vamonos!
Paasweekend

April 20, 2025 - Posted in agency-life build-in-public obra-studio ondernemen

Ik heb gisteren na 4 maanden eindelijk nog eens de tijd gevonden om een ritje te maken met de fiets. Een vriend had een volgwagen geregeld. Met zijn drieën gingen we op weg naar Teotihuacan (ongeveer 60km van Mexico-Stad).

Het was een fantastische fietsrit en ik was blij om nog eens iets anders te doen dan werken, want het is nogal intens geweest de laatste maanden.

Het is een vreemd jaar voor design. Ik zie een paar zaken in de markt.

Eén feit is dat er op dit moment veel designers aan het werk zijn die eigenlijk maar half weten wat ze doen, wat na enkele maanden werk de facto een negatieve impact geeft op de perceptie van design binnen een bedrijf.

Een bedrijf dat met prutser(s) werkt beslist na een negatieve ervaring dan al eens snel om design door front-enders te laten doen, of niét te doen, met een niet-ontworpen product als gevolg. Zeker als er bespaard moet worden.

Een slechte ervaring met een UX-bedrijf is van alle tijden. We zagen dit patroon met Mono reeds in 2014; er waren meerdere bedrijven die terug overtuigd moesten worden van het nut van design.

Ik denk dat die “slechte ervaring” nu overgegaan is naar het interne. Designers werken in bedrijven maar kunnen niet eeuwig claims blijven maken over het “design systeem verbeteren” als job-bezigheid.

Op een bepaald moment moeten ze een sprong maken naar écht product design en de zaken fundamenteel bekijken (als dat werk al bestaat binnen het bedrijf in kwestie). Er zijn er die dat kunnen, en er zijn er die blijven hangen in hun enige vaardigheid om een scherm te kunnen produceren. Daar zien managers van in dat de meerwaarde beperkt is, zeker als ze het min of meer zelf kunnen.

Er kan momenteel veel met templates (steek er maar rap een shadcn template in!), er kan verder geprompt worden om interface design te laten doen door niet-designers.

Maar ik vraag me af: leidt dat nu echt tot goede resultaten? Als ik de meeste resultaten van vibe coding zie denk ik: dit is verschrikkelijk. Hier is nu eens echt over niks nagedacht. Volgorde van de menu items? Micro-interacties? User flow? Allemaal genegeerd, om een snel prototype online te zetten… sorry, maar dat is geen product design.

Ik ben zelf super geïnteresseerd om de laatste technieken zelf te gebruiken (zoals het een paar dagen geleden uitgekomen Firebase Studio: dit is de nieuwe default voor mij), maar als ik zelf begin te vibe coden ben ik snel 60 iteraties ver om tot iets te komen dat op iets lijkt.

Om daarna de code te nemen en verder te werken in een Cursor; of om het toch terug naar een design app te brengen om er over na te denken. Met andere woorden: het proces stopt niet bij de initiële prompt. Over dit proces schreven we met Obra een hele gids.

Mensen denken doordat ze iets visueels te zien krijgen de perceptie dat je 80% van je werk klaar hebt terwijl het eigenlijk 20 of 30% is. Het is niet omdat je snel een interface kan bijeen prompten, dat die interface ook echt goed en bruikbaar is.

Die interface is niet gevalideerd, het is in feite een eerste ideetje dat je op je scherm hebt gekregen. Het is het equivalent van de eerste 3-4u werk in een designprogramma. Ja, je hebt een visueel artefact: maar dat is nog maar het begin van het werk. Als CXO ben je nu amazed dat je dat gedaan hebt gekregen, omdat je die vaardigheid voorheen niet had. Maar als je wat je nu hebt naar productie moet brengen, is er nog een lange weg te gaan.

Een markt bestaat uit vraag en aanbod, en de vraag is momenteel beperkt.

Ik ben er zeker van dat er een betere periode aankomt na een tijd, maar gegeven enig macro-economisch wereldnieuws in combinatie met een nakende recessie, en de twee bovenstaande factoren (prutsers die de markt verpesten; dat product managers en CXOs zelf een interface in elkaar kunnen knutselen), is er minder werk voor product designers.

Eén van mijn theorieën is dat, als het over de designers met te weinig skills gaat, dat een deel van die mensen de jobmarkt zullen verlaten omdat ze gewoon niet aan de slag kunnen.

Een ander deel zal via mentoring en de juiste motivatie toch doorbreken tot een goed designer profiel. (Ik denk terug aan een apprenticeship – laat iets weten als je het juiste profiel bent!)

Wat betreft het vibe coden van producten en het “niet meer nodig hebben van een dedicated designer”. Voor kleine bedrijven zal er na een paar maanden zal er wel een besef zal groeien dat er misschien enkele fundamenten missen in het designwerk, en het misschien toch eens met enige coherentie aangepakt moet worden.

Als een softwarebedrijf groot genoeg is, hebben ze sowieso toch dedicated designers nodig. En er zal altijd een markt bestaan voor kwaliteit.

Wij hebben als nieuw bureau wel boeiende opdrachten voor startups en SaaS-bedrijven, maar het plan dat ik had van het echt zwaar opschalen naar 5 FTE in 1 jaar lijkt me op dit moment nog wel vrij ambitieus.

Wij werken nu met 4 freelancers aan verschillende opdrachten maar in # uren gaat dit over 2 FTE. Binnenkort gaan we naar een 3 FTE. We groeien traag, maar gestaag.

“An agency is people” en de juiste mensen tegenkomen om het juiste team te vormen blijft een permanente uitdaging. Wij hebben momenteel 1 job uitstaan, maar als mijn verhaal je aanspreekt, los van die specifieke vacature – neem zeker contact op.

Ik ga volgende week nog eens naar Belgie, om de eerste persoon die vast in het team komt werken verwelkomen.

Als ik België ga neem ik altijd de kans om vrienden en familie te zien. Daarnaast neem ik de tijd om koffietjes te drinken met de juiste mensen. Een babbel brengt altijd iets. Als deze post je op 1 of andere manier aanspreekt, laat zeker iets weten.

Ik ben nog altijd bezig met het bouwen van een groter bedrijf en de enige manier om dat te doen is via de juiste projecten, opportuniteiten en contacten. Neem contact op voor een koffie!
Four months in

April 1, 2025 - Posted in obra-studio ondernemen

Currently, I am about four months in starting up my new agency. I wanted to document a bit of the journey as we move forward.

Starting a company has its ups and downs and is definitely not as stable a job as working for a product company, but most days I couldn’t be any happier with my decision to start an agency again.

Some days the doubts creep in. The most worrying part for me is that it’s particularly difficult this year to get the right clients, as some design processes have been turned on their head by the new AI design capabilities; the market is flooded with designers; and the impending recession isn’t particularly helping either.

I know what kind of projects we are good at: helping with the design role in a software team when a) a piece of software that is already successful is getting a redesign or b) in the phase of company growth where the company needs both the strategic vision of a senior designer, yet it’s not sensible to have a full-time hire. One task for me is to sell myself and my team to that specific kind of client.

When I was working in my previous agency, I literally had no idea how to do sales and business development. Most projects came via referral and overall things mostly flowed naturally. This is not the case this year and I have to do active outreach, keep a list of potential clients, and really get out there. I feel like I’ve picked up some skills in that area over the years. Part of it is a mindset to deliberately work on the company instead of in the company; another aspect is literally how you spend your time. If you are meant to work on business development, don’t be working on side projects or writing blog posts (guilty as charged…).

I also find it quite difficult to hire – what we do at Obra Studio is quite specialized. Even though there are many designers looking for roles, many don’t have the necessary skills to do the particular kind of work that we do. I’ve had a hard time defining what we want in designers. I am looking for sort of a mix between an agency and a product designer. Somebody T-shaped enough to switch roles within projects in the pursuit of shipping great software. Somebody who’s actually interested in user interfaces and didn’t just choose this field “to earn six figures”.

At this moment, we have two more open positions to fill. We are looking for a UI/UX designer with front-end skills. This is a contract role for one year in a part-time capacity. I am also still looking for a business partner to run operations in Belgium and take a joint risk in building the team. The main requirement is proven experience as an agency founder and to be driven to work on building out a boutique agency with a high quality standard.

The most difficult jump I foresee is the jump from 2FTE to 5FTE (full-time equivalent). While we currently work with 3 freelancers, we are only generating 2FTE of work. We need to move to generating work for 5 FTE. The business partner in Belgium is a crucial part in scaling up operations.

All in all, I can’t complain. The two things I was discussing are more or less evergreen problems for agencies: having enough clients, and hiring the right people. In general, things are going steady and we are approaching €75k revenue in a short period.

Currently, we have about 3 clients in what I’ve started to call “Obra Education” (Figma workshops, designing with AI workshops etc.) and another 3 in our main work, the design projects. Four clients are from Belgium, one from Luxembourg and one from the US.

I’ve steadily been working on our Craft CMS-based website with a trusty web developer freelancer. I’ve started to create landing pages for the different types of services we have on the Obra website. The latest one is about the UX rework of Bootstrap-based codebases. I was in a conversation where I was reminded that this was a specialty of my previous agency.

I notice more questions than I expected about Figma workshops; and about designing with AI. What I didn’t expect was no questions whatsoever about accessibility services, even though the European Accessibility Act is basically around the corner.

It’s tempting to sometimes focus on optimizing processes, but for now, given our tiny size (3 freelancers & me) it’s not necessary to optimize things too much. You can forever look at processes, templates and the perfect website. However, the focus should be on growth. I have to remind myself to keep my eyes on the ball.

It’s April 1st but I am already thinking a few months ahead. The summer months are typically low on work, as Belgium tends to fall asleep in July and you basically have out-of-offices talking to each other. I want to secure the right projects to work on to continue our growth trajectory. If you are in the market for an agency, check out our design services.
Treat it like a business

March 15, 2025 - Posted in blijvend-leren build-in-public entrepreneurship obra-studio ondernemen
You can have these dreams about a cool design agency, but in the end, you have to treat it like a business. But if you treat it too much like a business, it becomes something else, something you might not agree with.

This blog post is about purpose, strategy and vision. Three highly conceptual topics. I believe this post might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but linking it to the right persons will help me on my journey.

Purpose

I was asked this question this week in a survey:

What is the purpose of your firm? Please rate with:
- 0 as a minimum: Maximising shareholder value is the main driving force when making business decisions.
- Middle: When making business decisions we carefully balance financial, social and/or environmental objectives including the interests of our stakeholders.
- 7 as a maximum: Our company is deeply committed to both positive social and/or environmental outcomes. Purpose shapes our core value proposition and is a top priority of the company’s leadership.
When I answered, I put Obra squarely in the middle.

I had lots of thoughts lately about someone who made a statement that an agency is essentially a margin business; someone works for you, and then you take a margin on their wage/a cut on their freelance rate, and that’s it.

This comes with lots of philosophical questions; obviously my agency is providing employment for myself. It is providing employment for others (currently 3 freelancers & growing)

Obviously we have to make profit to exist.

But that’s not all there is to it.
- You want to work on projects you ethically agree with.
- You want to provide quality work that you are proud of. If my work was a dumpster fire but I got paid handsomely for it, I wouldn’t be happy.
- You want to grow as a person & team
- You want to build a team; there’s a social aspect to the job.
So within the range of “maximizing shareholder value” and “fully purpose-driven”?

Let’s find a good middle ground. Maybe shift it a bit more to purpose-driven if we have enough stability/money and thus the luxury to do so. Then another question that made me think:

Strategy

To what extent is your company planning the strategy? Please rate with:
- 0 as a minimum: We have some idea about the strategic direction, though there is no clear strategic plan.
- Middle: We have a strategic plan, but we did not carefully generate alternative strategies to determine this plan.
- 7 as a maximum: We have clearly determined the firm’s long-term strategic plan and generated and evaluated alternative strategies before we determined this plan.
For this one, once again I put Obra straight in the middle.

But to be honest, it should probably have been 1 or 2: “We have some idea about the strategic direction, though there is no clear strategic plan.”

I determined strategy and planning are 2 entirely different activities (thanks to this helpful video); then put my own spin on it.

So these things are separated: a strategy comes from identifying a market opportunity, then checking if your company can do it better, faster or cheaper, by applying tactics. These tactics lead to activities.

Fig 1: Strategy: market opportunities lead to a strategy, lead to tactics, lead to activities

These activities can eventually be planned. So in a way, there is a thing as “strategic planning”, but how you get to it is not by starting with the planning.

So for example, a market opportunity I determined is doing something with the rise of LLMs that can basically generate entire front-ends now. Combining this with earlier vast experience in HTML prototyping and design skills as a team it leads to an opportunity to do something unique (see; slides on LinkedIn).

Such a market opportunity can be mapped on a strategy board. But then the actual activities to get there (make the slide deck, present the deck, determine the workflow, create project templates etc.) are a different process.

Like the referenced videoa above states, too often these things get conflated.

Fig 2: Activities: some you do, some you don’t. We all have limited time to execute on things. What is needed and what is a distraction?

Vision

Another thing I was triggered by this week is this checklist in the intro of the book Traction.

Specifically I was triggered by the first five points in the “Organizational checkup”:
1. We have a clear vision in writing that has been properly communicated and is shared by everyone in the company.
2. Our core values are clear, and we are hiring, reviewing, rewarding, and firing around them.
3. Our Core Focus™ (core business) is clear, and we keep our people, systems and processes aligned and focused on it.
4. Our 10-Year Target™ (big, long-range business goal) is clear, communicated regularly, and is shared by all.
5. Our target market (definition of our ideal customer) is clear, and all of our marketing and sales efforts are focused on it.
Figure 3: organizational checkup, from the book Traction (taken from the free Kindle sample)

Do we really have a clear vision, in writing? Currently, we work with 3 freelancers, so it’s not that important to go all vision on them. But as we will progress towards having more business partners, payroll employees, more collaborators etc. this will become increasingly important.

The book Traction was written specifically for a company that’s doing semi-well, 2M revenue with 10 people (in US market), but that’s kind of stuck where they are. The author argues that with their plan they have basically led these kinds of companies on a growth pad to unlock a better business.

I find most business books to be summarizable in a few key sentences. One book that helped me a few months ago was the eMyth – it’s also referenced in this book. Another one I need to look into is profit first.

When it comes to vision, with Mono our goal was to become a reference in UI design in Belgium, building high quality designs to serve our clients.

High quality is very specific; how do you even determine quality? (Dear reader, this question would lead us to far, but I certainly want to give this topic a go later ;))

A reference is in the eye of the beholder: who are you a reference to? Do you seek the respect of peers? What is “recognition” anyway?

Obra Studio is in many ways a continuation of what we did with Mono, but I feel like this time around, I need to work more on the business instead of in the business.

The core logic of wanting to do quality work stays.

But there are so many new factors around this time, from AI to me living in Mexico to how the UX market is evolving (in weird ways). I guess the challenge is to keep chipping away at the problems, tackle them, and build the business.

If this blog post vibes with you in any way, feel free to e-mail me: johan@obra.studio . I removed the business partner listing from the website but I am still looking to collaborate with the right people to make this happen.
Subframe

March 8, 2025 - Posted in apps design design-systems development workflow

This week I got a chance to try out Subframe. It’s a new design tool that is slightly hard to position within the category of design tools.

Subframe follows the logic of Subform (RIP) where you are not working on a free canvas, but all your designs are “auto layout” by default.

A tool like Framer — that leans towards auto layout all the things — still allows you to draw something freely and then put it in a stack when you like; allowing for sort of a Figma-like freedom when exploring ideas (minus the proper vector tools).

In Subframe you don’t have that “creative freedom”, rather you are constrained to changing layouts by either editing them in a sort of “insert component in an already existing stack”-kind of way or by prompting them with AI.

The benefit of this style of working is that designs are essentially constrained to the “system”, which then allows for an immediate code export. In the spectrum of creativity vs system design, Subframe sits squarely in the system design logic.

In the current version, the base system itself does not seem that manipulatable (relying on a bunch of base ShadCN/Tailwind like components like many AI code generators).

What I would find interesting towards the future is to be able to manipulate the base system in a manner that’s more flexible. In my projects I have a lot of custom needs.

Another thought I have is that if code conversion is immediate, but you then change something in the code, like adding a new component, how do you ever backport it back to the design app?

Within design systems, for years, we’ve been looking for sources of truth.

There is the design tokens logic (often overcomplexified by consultants); there is the problem of syncing design to code; and there is the problem of working at scale. On the corporate level you usually end up with a tome of guidelines (think Shopify, IBM…) that is sometimes helpful and sometimes wildly inflexible.

Would Subframe help solve this problem by having an immediate bridge between design and coding work? The paradigms the founder are working on are at the verg least extremely interesting explorations into this problem statement, and I am looking forward to follow its further development.
Trip conclusion #3: industry shift thanks to AI

February 24, 2025 - Posted in ai obra-studio

This final post continues my blog posts based on the conclusions of my trip to Belgium. This one is about how AI changes the game for designers.

I was in a lot of conversations in the past weeks. One overarching theme was the change to design as a job. The big shift that is happening in software due to AI is also causing a big change in the perception towards UI and UX design.

At the risk of oversimplifying; after the internalization of UX, many people landed in software teams with an overindexed focus on design systems.

It’s always been a bit wrong to “follow the sprint” but many designers are in that kind of job. They are creating and modifying screen designs without being in the strategy seat. They have to fight for any access to users and often don’t even talk to a real person using their design work for weeks or months on end.

Design never got it’s seat at the management table: that seat went to product managers who decided what to do next.

Now that the “design system” is a solved problem in some companies — or something that can be solved by a templatized solution in others — many are wondering what’s left to do for designers.

My answer has always been to focus on the actual design problem at hand. What are we solving, why and how? Invest in research, make a drawing, validate with stakeholders and then make it as real as possible to present it to the user.

I believe now that it’s possible to do prototyping and validation work that used to take a few weeks in a few days, many smart teams will likely scale down how much design they need on a permanent basis.

Within the work itself, I think many types of in-between work for UI designers will just simply disappear. Especially for business software based on standard patterns.

Some work that used to take a lot of time will likely be done by less people, sometimes not even designers. Smart front-end developers or product managers will fill gaps where they used to need a designer. This will lead to “mediocre” designers essentially being pushed out of their job.

This then leads me to conclude that the overall level you need as a designer to stand out will be much higher. It’s one of the reasons I’ve decided to narrow my hiring search to freelancers only.

As for how someone can stand out, I keep going back to UX/UI designers with an initial training in either graphic design or front-end development. IGood work is going to come down to being great at your craft, and being dynamic at switching roles in a project. The same work will be done by less people.

As a designer you will need to be able to switch between project roles more fluidly, while at the same time being able to fall back on your initial training and specific UX’er knowledge (research techniques and user-centered design activities).

As a designer, I don’t see the flood of new AI tools as a danger to my job. In fact, I am excited to see how they can help me do a better job.
High quality UI for anyone, not just startups

February 20, 2025 - Posted in obra-studio ondernemen

This post continues my blog posts based on the conclusions of my trip to Belgium. If you are curious, you can read my post from Tuesday about hiring only freelancers (for now) + focus on a design lead and my other post with general end of trip conclusions. After this, one more post is coming up about how the shift to AI affects design work as a whole.

When I created the first Obra homepage it said “Helping startups scale to the next design level”. Many people challenged me on specifically working for startups and they were right.

I started a project for two startups in the first +-2 months of Obra Studio, and I immediately felt it didn’t match with my other vision of scaling up an agency. As an agency you need cashflow, reliability and some level of predictability.

Just for context, what I am working on is to achieve a UI agency focussed on quality user interfaces. As far as headcount I am aiming to work with +-7 people working full-time near the end of the year, eventually scaling to 15-ish team members in a few years.

A friendly CFO focused on startups told me: “Johan, these pre-seed startups, they are struggling for money, they are bootstrapping to the maximum. It’s the worst financial period of their lives. Before funding, there is no money”. I felt his words at a small scale while I was struggling to get budgets and worried what it would be like when I would have to pay a full team.

This does not mean that we won’t work for startups at all; it’s just that I decided our prospective clients are people who want great quality UI, regardless of their company stage. I do have a preference for slightly smaller companies, because that’s where sometimes the interesting action happens.

This is just my current business theory that might need some revision after a while, and I’ll be curious to review this post in one year.
Changes in jobs: freelancers only + hiring design lead

February 18, 2025 - Posted in hiring obra-studio ondernemen

As mentioned in my blog post end of the trip I will post some details the next few days about some conclusions I had during this business trip.

I suppose once I have everything set up, this business blogging will more or less stop, but now that I am actively building the company, it’s interesting to write as a form of thinking. I also get lots of reactions about these posts, incentivizing me to write more.

This post is about hiring and the decisions around that topic.

As posted on LinkedIn, I decided to remove the payroll role. I couldn’t find the right person when it came to skills vs their pay expectations. I got lots of applications from people with too little experience. I got some OK applications from designers with the right experience, but then they had way too high expectations regarding salary.

The mix between high salary costs in Belgium and general averageness of the payroll applications creates a problem for employers. I don’t know if the Belgian government really realizes they are scaring entrepeneurs away, and they are not exactly creating an attractive investment climate.

The mix between high payroll costs, high administrative burdens, and lack of flexibility made me decide to try and find the right combo in freelancers – including Mexican freelancers.

Within this decision, I found a few great designers already, on the Belgian side, who will be the first people helping out Obra ship great design projects for our clients.

Next to the team I already have on call, I need more people with the right skills who can hit the ground running. So if you are a freelancer and have solid UI and/or front-end skills, check out our updated jobs page.

I am looking for people who want to do more than just do the work project-based and can help to build the company; and this both in Belgium and in Mexico city.

As for the business partner, I removed this role from the website. This is an extremely difficult role to hire for. And some signals are telling me it’s not the right choice to put this role with one person. In a small company context, everyone has to help grow the company.

For now, I split up the “business partner” role from the “design lead” role. It was worth a try to try and find a person who could do both, but I think it’s not realistic in the short term. Rather than have a ghost job posting, I would rather have none and work on this problem in the background.

One reasoning I had for the business partner was to run and grow the Belgian part of the company, at all kinds of levels: sales, marketing business development, but then also design leadership in the projects. When I challenged myself on that reasoning, I didn’t really see a reason why there couldn’t be a split between day-to-day work and real-life tasks and the actual growing of the company and business development.

In talks with people I gave the specific examples of answering a Belgian client at 9AM, when I am sleeping in Mexico; and being able to go to physically to a client for workshops and usability testing. I put these tasks with the business partner, but since every individual designer at Obra also talks directly to the clients, why split that up? If anything, I trust the freelancer team I built so far way more to do this than the payrollers I was interviewing. So this can be covered.

Then the business development side, this is actually a separate task, that I am fully commited to. I’ve decided to not actually design too much this year: I am working on the business part of Obra. Every moment should be spent selling, hiring, coaching, mentoring… not designing myself. Except for maybe some AI front-end projects where I can really learn something new and make an epic deliverable for the client.

One danger in hiring is trying to find a copy of yourself: that just doesn’t work. When I do business development and overall project vision, and the designers and front-enders can design and prototype great work, we are essentially complementary. When I try to find a business developer in a designer, I am essentially looking to reflect myself on the Belgium side, which then just leads to a 1 +1 = 2 situation, not 1 + 1 = 3. In times of abundance, maybe it helps to just scale up and make money because the economy is with you, but in times of scarcity, it’s better to deeply think about who you partner up with.

Those are a lot of words and reasonings to find out why you will now find the freelance design lead as a separate job posting.

I have to flesh out the logic behind this job but it would be a contract with a base wage and a specific perf-based aspect. I’d like to thank a specific freelancer (you know who you are) — and my dad — to help bring me to this line of reasoning through our talks.
End of the trip conclusions

February 17, 2025 - Posted in obra-studio ondernemen
My business trip to Belgium is nearing it’s end. It’s been a productive three weeks with a lot going on. Now the time comes to return back to Mexico. I can look back at a productive period where I got lots of work done and set up the logic for the rest of the year for Obra Studio.
- I gave two talks: a talk about designing with AI at Mobile Vikings and a guest class about understanding user interface design at Artevelde in Ghent (the pandemic version of that talk is here)
- I met my startup client Beam and had some real-life workshops/work sessions to move the startup into the right direction
- I had some great talks with agency founders, thanks Bert, Pieter-Jan and Thomas for the great discussions.
- I had some great conversations with a person who is helping me with business development. He is helping me much more than he realizes (you know who you are!)
- I met some prospective team members and potential business partners, and I signed the first Obra employment contract (more on that below)
- We signed the first medium-sized project, with some interesting leads for bigger projects. Surprisingly there are quite some leads from the US, which is a great signal.
Over the past next days I will be posting about some conclusions from the trip, both in company positioning, hiring and in the vision of how to incorporate AI into design going forward.

Purpose

Strategy

Vision