I am rebooting my agency and hiring designers. As an exercise, below is my idealized 1-year evaluation of a new team member. If you are interested, take a look at the Obra Jobs page.
Dear designer,
Thank you for your first year at Obra. In this year, we did a lot of work as a team.
As a founder, I’m happy we grew the team to seven people. Now we have a solid base of designers to grow the company once more.
We’re aiming to become a design reference worldwide, and it’s thanks to your work that we’re well on our way.
I want to thank you – your work has been more than stellar.
From working on massive application prototypes, to helping three startups get funding because of your rich prototypes, to mentoring a new designer in a team, you really helped Obra get further.
It was an awesome year. I loved our time at [undisclosed conference]. Remember that talk that inspired us to look at startups in a different way?
We found new workflows where we found better ways to validate product decisions. We experimented a lot with AI to use it in meaningful ways. But you never lost sight of the actual humans using your designs.
You already knew how to work with Figma like a pro when you joined the company, but you stepped it up by making a custom plug-in to help our internal workflow.
When there was a new feature, you immediately learned how it worked and applied it to your projects.
I’m also happy with the new design app [undisclosed]. It really upped the animation level in our projects and made it easy to ship animations to development.
What I like is your collab with our Mexican brand designer. You interpreted her brand work, upped your visual skills along the way and took the base of the branding in [undisclosed project] and applied it in a perfectly executed way to the application UI. You made excellent derivative work of the brand and upped your illustration skills.
For the biggest project, I loved that you took the lead in the strategy for the features and that you actually worked on the hundreds of screens for all the user stories alongside a new team member that you were mentoring at the same time as executing the project. This shows both the ability to execute and to grow as a leader.
Actually, I have to mention that your communication skills have been great. You are very good at ”Slack etiquette”.
In meetings you are making sure that meetings don’t go off-topic. When I mentioned that every meeting needs an agenda, you took it to heart and you executed on that comment.
That one time the team was discussing a new technique in one of our Friday sharing sessions, you actually improved upon it and came back with a logic that made sense and that we could as a templated way of working company-wide. You documented it on Notion and we used it successfully internally for three more projects until we discovered another better way.
You also stepped it up when you gave a scoping workshop for the client. Maybe there is a future product manager in you?
I would like to know how you want to grow as an employee and where you want to take your career.
With the right mix of skills, we can build an awesome theme and become that design reference that we all strive for.
I want Obra to be the place to do your best work. So let’s decide what your focus points are for next year and how you can grow as a designer.
A client might come to us with the question to design a logo; but in our minds, it’s the start of a larger branding process.
A logo can hardly be designed in isolation; it’s necessary to cement it within a cohesive brand, with considerations for typography and colours. Ideally, there is room to work on stylistic brand elements and brand icons, but this depends on the project length.
With our startup clients, that project length is usually short, and we hardly have the time to think about a brand guide and strict guidelines for weeks. They need something fast, because their new company will be announced in three weeks.
This is not a made-up example, but it’s is based on a true story, which is why it’s easy to write about: we just went through this process.
The brand process starts with an intake meeting where we talk about the company the logo is for, with questions about aesthetic preferences and references in the market.
We usually design for tech startups. There are choices to be made: do you want to blend in, or do you want to stand out?
There are budget concerns to be discussed such as the cost and licensing of fonts. Font licensing can be prohibitely expensive depending on the choices you make. There are ways to “level up” your brand over time and start with something that doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg, and that can be upgraded.
Next in the process is investigating how the logo will look. There are of course a myriad ways that any logo could be designed. We will sketch, on paper and digitally, to find out what the logo could look like. We will look at the shapes of the letterforms, how the typography should be set, how the logo could be perceived. This usually results in a crazy big Illustrator file with tons of variations and ideas.
Usually a logo has two main elements: an emblem and a typographic treatment. However, a logo could be typography-only or even emblem-only (such as the Nike logo). We don’t recommend the latter unless you are so famous you can drop your brand name and simply exist as a by-then iconic icon.
For the typographic treatment, we might choose to set the chosen brand name in all caps or lowercase. For higher-end branding, a typographical treatment on the brand name itself or even custom typography might be the chosen way to go. This last option can be costly and might be more of a thing to do later, when the startup has become a scale-up.
By the “emblem”, we mean the illustrative part of a logo. Many logos have this on the left side next to the text, but this is not always. For software, I myself prefer this type of logo because the visual on the side of the logo can immediately be used for an app icon (and subsequently a favicon).
What the logo references is usually one of the biggest questions. What meaning does the logo convey? This is a question you can think about forever, but let’s say we’re designing a logo for a company called FlowerKing. Obviously you will think of flowers and royalty. Now what visual do you choose? Will you draw a crown of flowers, keep things abstract, or something else? This thinking process can lead you very far. As a startup, your most viable asset is speed, so you need to make a decision. But at the same time, you want to be viewed as a professional party, so you do need to spend a bit of time on this, to avoid logo disasters and unwanted copyright issues.
A lot of logo work in the world is lazy. You can see that the creators avoided the logo thinking process by simply referencing the first letter in a logo, not having an illustrative emblem and simply a typographical treatment in a simple font. If you forego the creative process, you are also foregoing building a recognizable brand.
As we explore different directions, we will find proposals ways to display a brand that feel right. As you look at that crazy Illustrator file, some direction jump out more than others and might stay with you. That’s usually a good sign.
In a design review meeting, multiple directions are usually presented and talked about. We consider the bigger picture of the brand and the scope and timing of the project.
When a decision is made on how to move forward, final tweaks can be made. How does a logo look alongside other logos? What if it’s on a T-shirt? In the context of a website? An app? How does the logo tie in with the overall colour scheme?
As a final step, there is the logo delivery. Variations of the logo are made for several online applications such as a favicon and an app icon. Colours are considered for print. The logo is then delivered and ready for use.
As Obra, a brand new design studio, we have the capabilities to design a brand for you. If you’re interested, get in touch.
As I mentioned in my previous blog post about AI wireframing, your biggest asset as a startup is speed.
The last two workdays were spent using a combination of Claude, Figma, Cursor, and Wispr Flow to work on an HTML prototype.
I created a large desktop React prototype with seven modules (launch checklist, [secret module x5], settings), all interconnected in a clickable prototype to showcase the app concept.
In this workflow, I would first upload mockups to Claude 3.5, which would then process them into React components.
I would then fine-tune that part of the UI, download the code, and use the Composer functionality in Cursor to combine the modules.
Cursor is a fork of Visual Studio Code with enhanced AI capabilities, and it costs $20/month.
Composer is a feature within Cursor that allows you to ask questions about your entire codebase, not just a snippet of text. Your codebase is indexed, and when you ask a question, the answer involves changes across multiple files, which are made for you. Afterward, you simply accept the changes. You can even request consistency changes across the entire codebase.
I would use Wispr Flow to provide enough context for each prompt, simply speaking to my computer. It’s important to be clear about what you want to do—mention the affected routes and the module name, as you’re prompting the entire codebase.
About 10-15% of the prompts would need to be reverted, either because the tool misunderstood what I was trying to do or you would end up with a rendering error. Composer in Cursor has a “restore point,” so you can easily go back.
The changes would then be committed to a Git repository and immediately deployed to a live URL, allowing the client to view the changes in real-time, click through the prototype, and comment in Slack.
At the end of my workday, I would record a 2-minute high-quality video, clicking through the screens to demonstrate what is clickable and what is not (with minimal commentary).
This would serve as an artifact for the evolution of the prototype and give us a reference point. Since you can now effectively recreate a UI from a screenshot, the video becomes a snapshot of a concept you had.
The final result—a clickable prototype—can be used to validate an app concept with potential users, weeks or months before you’re able to develop the real, working version. Because it’s a real, clickable demo, where users can click through multiple paths and even do data entry and change content, they get a true impression of what the app would be like, as opposed to presenting them with a lower-fidelity, linear Figma prototype.
Interested in this workflow? Check out the Obra Studio website. With Obra we help startups get to the next design level.
I’ve used a new technique that I’ve called prompt wireframing where I use a combination of tools to get the job done.
There is this moment in a project when it’s unclear where things are going. There are designs somewhere. There’s a user story spreadsheet somewhere else. There are discussions happening, but there is no clarity about what should be built.
The designer’s way to solve this roadblock is to visualize it. Make a design. But how do you visualize something quickly? What if there’s many medium to high complexity UI parts, that have to come together?
Of course you can try to find the UI kit and draw the interface. At this point, you might be slow for certain UI elements and some complex interfaces.
You can start sketching, but that misses fidelity. Whatever you are drawing cannot be repeated. If you have a new idea, you basically have to draw a new sketch. You easily end up with 15-30 different sketches and now you’re losing track of which paper is for what.
I have a new technique that I’m pretty excited about: using LLMs to generate UI artifacts to then combine them into wireframes.
The way I would do this, is to start new Claude project and give context within the project. For example, what I put for a recent project is that users of this app that we are describing are Belgian, but that the UI is in English.
I use a dictation app called Wispr Flow. The reason to use this app is that I can talk faster than I can type.
First of all, you kind of need somewhat of an of what you’re going to build. It helps to have (some) sketches. With the sketches in front of me, I start describing the sketch by talking.
By holding down the Fn key on my Mac, I make sure that Wispr Flow is listening to my dictation.
I try to be literal in describing the sketch eg. this sketch shows a heading, a paragraph, an input with a value of ‘Enter your email’, a button that says ‘Subscribe now’ etc.
Whay Claude is essentially generating are pieces of UI that use React, shadcn/ui for the UI part, Tailwind (ugh) and Lucid for the icons.
The technical aspects behind it are actually not important. I would screenshot whatever is shown in the UI and use it as part of my wireframe. My process is not to actually use the generated code, but to take screenshots of the generated code and then sometimes use the screenshots to revisit the design of a screen.
(Although what you can also do is download the .tsx files and drop it into a Next.js project with some light edits. Then you’re on the way to make an interactive prototype)
Because the artifact is contained in a Claude conversation, you can come back to edit it in the appropriate Claude conversation. As I discover problems with the user flow by visualizing it in Figma, I would then go back to the individual conversations (usually about one screen) and re-prompt to add something, remove something, or change something.
I would composite the the screenshots into Figma and draw arrows between the screenshots to make sure that the user flow makes sense.
If you use this technique, you will quickly run out of tokens, so you might want to pay for Claude Pro, which is about 20 euros a month.
In a way this feels like a new discovery to me, but it also feels incredibly obvious given the tools we have today. Has anyone else been doing this? Do you have any variations on this technique? I’d love to find out.
As the year draws to a close, I saw a few “year in review” posts pop up, like this one by Pawel Grzybek. This seemed like a good idea, so I wrote one.
I used to make these year in review websites, where I would experiment with new technology. I also used them as a way to summarize my favorite music albums, movies and video games of the year. The last one I made is actually five years old now. It was the first one I built using Svelte, a web framework I love.
This post is a bit of a different format, as it’s a personal reflection about the year and a look forward. I decided to write about my favorite music, movies, games etc., but also throw in the categories of travel, work and sports to have a more balanced view of what happened this year.
As I noted today on BlueSky to an acquaintance looking for the right “content” to write, this is more for myself than for anyone else. I either write to promote something, to remember something, or just for fun. I find that if you have to call it content, you’re already on the wrong path.
As my wife and I were driving back from Puebla, a city two hours from Mexico City, I looked through the photos on my phone and looked at what happened this year. And boy… it was a lot.
Travel
This year, I traveled to the US twice for work reasons, went to Europe twice (once for work reasons), traveled within Mexico three times and went on a honeymoon. Suffice it to say, this year’s travel schedule was quite packed.
I’ll focus mostly on the things that might be interesting for (techy) readers of this blog.
Vision Pro in Chicago
In April I felt I just needed to experience the Vision Pro, and at the time it was only available in the US, so my wife and me took a trip to Chicago. The demo in the Apple Store was impressive, but I ended up not buying it because of the excessive cost, and the fear that the product would just end up collecting dust somewhere.
The Vision Pro hasn’t been very successful up so far — and I don’t see much talk about it anymore. I think there is a bigger future in computing that feels human enough. The ad of the dad filming his kids with the Vision Pro was really off-putting: that’s not really the future we want. The Orion from Meta is maybe showing glimpses of what could be cool, although I would also find it very off-putting that anybody could just film anybody else without them knowing.
SF for Figma’s Config
In June, I travelled to San Francisco to visit Figma’s config conference. I enjoyed this trip, with a really well organized conference, but also came away with the idea that a conference organized by a single software package is maybe not conducive to a lot of different perspectives.
I also remember thinking for days about the impact of the AI announcements on design tools. Figma kind of removed the feature and more or less silently re-launched it after all the bad reactions. I haven’t felt a need to use the AI features in Figma at all, except recently for the Rename layers feature. I have to admit that’s a nice addition.
Wedding & honeymoon
This year was the year that I got married. As a couple we spent a considerable time organizing our wedding (my wife more than me admittedly). A lot of Belgians travelled to Mexico to attend the wedding. I’m very thankful for everybody who came to attend our special day. We had a ton of fun and it was a really memorable time.
After the wedding, my wife and I went on a honeymoon to Singapore and Bali. I had been in charge of the holiday planning. We discovered Singapore a foodie paradise. Bali was beautiful, and truly a recommended destination, but for us, coming from Mexico, it was sooo far. Even though it is very beautiful, I feel like we kind of travelled halfway around the world to see a beach and a resort most days. Not that we didn’t do anything cultural there, but I felt part of that trip could have been made here in Mexico.
My personal travel resolution: See more of Mexico, like Chiapas and Baja California. Find a way to see nature in a deeper way, like a multi-day hike.
My work travel resolution: I already planned going to Belgium in February to network, see the right people for the start of Obra Studio as an agency and dive deep into the Belgian startup world. In May, I am going to Barcelona for the Svelte Summit.
A secondary plan is to visit a conference in the US, or do a city-to-city trip to visit several local tech meetups.
Music
Aside from a surprise concert by Interpol on the Zocalo (the main square in Mexico city) and a show of Jacob Collier, I don’t recall many live musical events throughout the year. We didn’t go to any festivals, and I also don’t recall a lot of albums that really caught my attention.
I mostly enjoyed music that I could put on while working, like Ocie Elliot, Kevin Kaarl, Kiasmos and Tycho. Peso Pluma (very popular here in Mexico) also works kind of well as background music.
All in all, it was not such an exciting musical year. I guess I had other things that I was focussing on.
My personal music resolution: Make a conscious effort to really listen to new albums. Go to at least two concerts.
Movies
I felt like there were not that many great movies in cinemas. Maybe we are still seeing the effects of the pandemic, and 2025 will finally be a year for better movies. Or maybe I am just not that much into it anymore.
I liked Inside Out 2 for the Pixar take on dealing with puberty and the surrounding anxiety. This might be a movie that parents will reference for years.
I thought Dune: Part Two and Joker: Folie a Deux were mostly more of the same and not that memorable.
I saw Furiosa: A Max Max Saga and Twisters on a tiny plane screen and I actually really enjoyed those. Maybe I should see them again on the big screen.
As for two other favorites: I really liked Challengers, that was a movie like they should be. I also liked watching Civil War in a near-empty cinema, a movie that hooks you until you see the credits roll.
I feel like just as with music, my attention wasn’t really too much on movies either (unlike some previous years).
My personal movie resolution: Dust off my projector and spend some more time watching quality movies. Look more closely what friends are recommending (e.g. on Letterboxd)
Personal finance
An interest that has popped up for me over the past two years is personal finance.
I keep a close eye on the stock market, and think about ways to invest. I talk to friends about investing and think of ways to increase my personal wealth. It’s interesting to see the numbers evolve. I listen to finance podcasts on walks almost every day – maybe a bit too much.
As I am setting up a new business again, I am researching how the tax system works here in Mexico and what my best options would be. Most people find this the most boring topic in the world but I find it interesting; the way that a country decides to tax its people and the policies around it are often a direct result of policies trying to stimulate specific behavior. It ties into a bigger economic picture that I find more interesting to follow year over year.
Series
I really liked watching all the seasons of Billions with my wife, but that’s not a 2024 show. Still, if you don’t know about it, I heartily recommend it.
The Penguin was really good up until the middle of the season and then it got kind of tedious.
I really, really liked The Gentlemen. That was brilliant, and I hope a second season comes.
There’s a few series I started watching, or watched only bits and pieces of, that maybe I should return to: Shōgun, The Bear, and Fallout.
My series resolution: Less random watching whatever pops up on Netflix or Prime, more conscious watches based on friend recs.
Work: main work
I was working as a product designer for Doccle up until the end of October. After 2,5 years there, I decided to leave to challenge myself to build something new.
After some soul-searching, I decided to pick up building an agency again.
There is something about the clarity and variety of project-based work that really appeals to me. I think the lessons I learned from being on the inside of a product organisation as well as those of my side projects can be very useful when going back to being a services provider.
My work resolution: Work hard to make Obra Studio a success.
Work: side projects
I worked on Obra Icons a lot. All of it got a real upgrade, from the website, to the icons in the set itself, to the addition of a Figma plugin and a React package.
My experiments with making apps by prompting where super successful. It’s crazy how far you can get with prompting, even to developing a native iOS app. I am looking forward to take this further in 2025, although I am not sure how much time I will have with me starting up Obra as an agency.
Sports
I bought a Trek road bike in the very beginning of 2024. It changed and influenced my whole year, and my perspective on biking.
I understand biking as a professional sport much better now. I met my Spanish language teacher while biking and he became a good friend. One bike friend led to another and right before my wedding we did a bachelor’s ride with a group of friends.
I had a fantastic ride in summer with a good friend and got to experience the Belgian roads with a new perspective.
Bike culture in Mexico city is phenomenal. Every single day you can find a group riding (if you’re willing to wake up early in the morning). I wrote a bit about this in Dutch here.
As for running… well… let’s say biking took over!
My biking resolution: Finally do La Venta and move on to more challenging rides such as Piramides (100km).
Language learning
In the beginning of the year, I read my first novel in Spanish. As mentioned, I met my language teacher on the bike. We first had two 1-hour lessons a week and then changed it up to a single 1,5 h session a week.
I got better at using the past in Spanish. I still have to work on being better at expressing the future, as well as being better in speaking in general. I would say my understanding has greatly improved, but it’s still not entirely where I want it to be. Especially at busy family parties I can kind of lose track of the conversation.
My language learning resolution: While the repetition was great to keep learning in 2025, I would like a more structured way to learn where I can pass a grade like B-level, eventually C-level.
Games
PS5
One day, I bought a PS Plus subscription for the whole year. At first I felt like I didn’t get the value from it, but then over time, as I checked out different games, I really enjoyed the variety. I re-played the beginning of GTA V, I enjoyed and even finished Dave the Diver and I remember an evening playing Cult of the Lamb furiously.
I am contemplating picking up the new Dragon Age, the Star Wars game on a sale sometime, but I am in no hurry to pay €80 for a video game I might only play a few hours.
As for boxed games, I bought AstroBot for the Christmas holidays and I am really enjoying it.
PC
I also play on PC, mostly games that are Xbox Games Pass. What I do there is dip in and out: I pay Game Pass for a month to play a certain game (like just recently Indiana Jones) and then I cancel my account again. I don’t feel the need to have a full-time subscription.
Switch
On the Nintendo Switch side, I picked up the Nintendo Switch again for the new Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom game and have really enjoyed it. An unplayed copy of the new Mario Party and Mario RPG are (shamefully) still in my Switch carrying case.
Other
I own a Playdate, but the screen is just too small to enjoy gaming for me. I even tried buying reading glasses to alleviate the problem, but I just don’t have the eyes of an 8 year old anymore.
YouTube
I am a big YouTube fan. I find that whatever I find on YouTube is so well catered to my interests I mostly prefer YouTube over TV.
For bike enthusiasts, I can recommend Path less pedaled, a channel about “alt“ cycling with much less of a focus on competitiveness and more of a focus on the joy of riding.
For gamers, I enjoy Gameranx and IGN for their compilation videos. However, I would like to branch out and see more interesting game related videos. If anyone has any channel recommendations, please send them!
Actually, for games, the most interesting media is I follow is actually written. I bought a subscription to Aftermath and GameFile to stay up to date on all things games-related. Some part of me sometimes dreams of being a video game journalist, but then I get back to reality where I know that software design is a much better way to make a living.
I’ve been coffee-curious for a while, and 2025 might just be the year that I invest more time into coffee as a hobby. For that, there’s of course James Hoffmann; but I recently also started watching Lance Hedrick‘s channels.
For tech in general, Marques Brownlee can’t be beat, although the wallpaper app he launched as kind of a miss. I like that Becca Farsace now has her own channel after she left The Verge. I still like that website though, and took the time to get a The Verge subscription when they launched it as it’s my primary source for tech news.
Looking forward
With each passing year, I feel as though time flies by faster and faster.
I already know that 2025 will be an interesting year, with multiple trips planned, the exciting prospect of building a new company, spending time together as a newly married couple, and much more.
Right now, I am looking at the designs for the new Obra website. Earlier last week, I posted an update to the current website, changing my positioning from being a solo contractor to an agency founder looking to find the right people.
My intent is to have the correct mix of working on the business itself and on design projects. Obviously a big part of my week will be filled with design work, and as things get bigger, a bigger project might consume most of my attention in some weeks; but with this new mindset I have, it’s important to work on the actual business.
That means hiring, talking to the right people, getting out of my comfort zone and bringing the ideas behind my new venture out there: I’m here, and I want to grow my company. I want to grow it faster than my previous company Mono. I want to take the lessons from that period and do better.
I was listening to the e-myth book on my walks around my neighborhood, Condesa. In this business book, the author narrates about the three different personalities living in all of us. The technician, the manager, and the entrepeneur. This book (thanks for the recommendation Ermeen!) is opening my mind: for a long time, I was a technician. I was focussed on the actual design projects, on executing them well, and not on the business part. The author states that most small business owners are 70% technician, 20% manager and 10% entrepeneur.
The technician fell in love with the technical aspects of their job. In my case design. For some period, there was nothing that I would rather do than make great design systems in Figma, convert those design systems to performant, accessible front-ends, and work on mostly technical aspects of a user interface. Do we need a dialog-on-dialog system, or should we go for panels? Should we use CSS modules, or do we try this new framework? The technician got their success from being a great technician; they are proud of knowing what they know; and they are ready to do the work.
The manager, he wants to manage the day to day. There are incoming client requests, there is someone who’s going on a holiday and we need to replace them, a vendor oversold their product and now we are stuck with something suboptimal. The manager, he seeks stability. He wants to make sure that everything is handled, and handled well. I was a manager for a while, in the Mono period, albeit for a small team.
Now we come to a part that I see myself taking more seriously now. The entrepeneur, he is the engine of change. He is discontent with the status quo, and he wants something better. He wants to have a bigger team, he wants to make more money, he wants to make his mark.
For the past 2,5 years, I have mostly been a technician. But in the past 6 months, the entrepeneurial side has awakened in me.
I’ve been living in Mexico for some time now, and I finally have the right to start a business here. My Spanish is getting better. I am meeting startup founders, VCs. I am discovering interesting small design studios that I didn’t know existed.
In my mind, this opens up a world of possibilities. I see what I did with Mono and how nice of a time it was; and I want to repeat that, but in new ways.
I get a little bit angry when I see bad design. When I observe what’s around me, I see so much opportunities to do better.
I want to help designers up their craft; I want to ship the work that I would be proud of; and I want to do it in an outfit that makes sense. Big enough to make a difference; small enough to keep that drive for quality alive, with an obsessive focus on quality.
How can you help?
I am looking for a business partner to lead operations in Belgium for Obra Studio. The job description is here. If you know someone, make sure to sent them this!
I am looking for freelance designers (coding designers or pure UI/UX) to help drive the first projects of Obra. Book a call to get to know each other — or if we know each other already, to get up to date — here.
Lastly, some real-life aspects:
I am looking to meet up and have a coffee with the right people in Mexico City the first few weeks of January. Startup founders, local designers, UI developers, product managers. Get in touch via my e-mail: johan@obra.studio. I will be organising a new Tacos y Tecnología in January. Keep an eye on my Bluesky account.
From end of January to mid february I am in Belgium, same deal: looking to talk to the right people. I will visit startup places like Corda Campus, Wintercircus Gent, and a few companies in Antwerp. Get in touch!
Lastly, I wish everyone great holidays, to have a nice time with family, and to start off 2025 with lots of positive energy.
Este verano terminé mi contrato con Doccle después de dos años y medio. Llevo 2 años viviendo en la Ciudad de México, donde conocí al amor de mi vida. Después de una boda maravillosa y la luna de miel que la acompañó, hace dos semanas tocaba retomar el hilo del trabajo.
Se siente como un momento especial, como un nuevo comienzo. Hace unos años tuve una agencia en Bélgica, Mono, y la verdad es que estaba muy orgulloso de ella. Hicimos un buen trabajo para varios clientes, teníamos un buen equipo, enseñamos mucho a varios diseñadores y yo mismo aprendí mucho durante esos años. Con una forma de trabajar única, al final trabajamos para una buena combinación de startups y empresas muy grandes.
Un grupo de personas que pueden trabajar juntas para lograr un objetivo y que dan gran importancia a la calidad, eso fue algo especial. Y hace un buen año que tengo en mente que quiero recuperarlo.
Quiero volver a esa emoción de empezar un nuevo proyecto con decenas de ideas. Quiero recuperar ese orgullo por la entrega de un hermoso proyecto que es realmente valioso para una empresa.
La semana pasada comencé a trabajar en un proyecto corto para una startup y me siento como pez en el agua. Se siente bien.
En verano dudaba si quería volver a trabajar a tiempo completo para una empresa de productos, pero ya había tomado una decisión: Obra Studio es el camino a seguir.
Estoy buscando un segundo proyecto para el periodo diciembre/enero, aunque sospecho que ya es un poco tarde para empezar algo. Puedes encontrar mi portafolio aquí. Actualmente me centro principalmente en trabajar con startups. Para una startup, puedo aportar el máximo valor con mis habilidades. Esto abarca desde el diseño de la aplicación hasta el front-end y la ayuda con la estrategia de comercialización.
Actualmente estoy en el proceso de iniciar un negocio aquí en México. Buscar un contador, hacer negocios con el gobierno… todo es territorio familiar, pero ahora en un nuevo país y en un idioma diferente. Y ahora tengo que trabajar con el SAT…
Con Obra Studio volveré a construir un negocio. Será ligeramente diferente que la última vez. Con vínculo con México, con una mezcla entre emprendimientos y trabajo con clientes… ¡pero haremos negocios y haremos proyectos apasionantes!
Busco diseñadores talentosos en Bélgica y México que quieran colaborar en una nueva historia. En febrero viajaré a Bélgica durante unas semanas para sentarme con varias personas y hacer planes.
Deze zomer beëindigde ik na 2,5 jaar mijn contract bij Doccle. Ik woon sinds 2 jaar in Mexico-stad, waar ik de liefde van mijn leven heb ontmoet. Na een schitterend huwelijk en bijbehorende huwelijksreis was het twee weken geleden de tijd om de draad van het werk opnieuw op te pikken.
Het voelt aan als een bijzonder moment, een beetje een nieuwe start. Een paar jaar geleden had ik een agency in België, Mono, en ik was daar eigenlijk apetrots op. Wij deden goed werk voor verschillende klanten, hadden een goed team, hebben een aantal designers veel bijgebracht en zelf heb ik in die jaren veel bijgeleerd. Met een unieke manier van werken werkten we uiteindelijk voor een goede mix van startups en wel érg grote bedrijven.
Een groep mensen die samen naar een doel toe kunnen werken, die kwaliteit hoog in het vaandel dragen, dat was iets bijzonders. En het zit nu al een goed jaar in mijn hoofd dat ik dat terug wil.
Ik wil terug die rush van een nieuw project opstarten met tientallen ideeën. Ik wil terug die trots van een mooie projectoplevering die voor een bedrijf echt waardevol is.
Ik ben vorige week begonnen werken aan een kort project voor een startup en ik voel me als een vis in het water. Het voelt juist aan.
In de zomer heb ik getwijfeld of ik niet terug full-time voor een product bedrijf wil werken, maar nu had ik de knoop door: Obra Studio is de weg vooruit.
Ik zoek nog een tweede project voor de periode december/januari, al vermoed ik dat het wat laat in het jaar is om nog iets op te starten. Mijn portfolio vind je hier. Ik mik momenteel vooral op werken met startups. Voor een startup kan ik met mijn vaardigheden het meeste waarde leveren. Dat gaat van app design tot front-end tot helpen met de go-to-market strategie.
Momenteel ben ik bezig met het proces om hier een onderneming op te richten. Een boekhouder zoeken, zaken regelen met de overheid… het is ergens allemaal bekend terrein, maar nu wel in een nieuw land en in een andere taal.
Met Obra Studio zal ik opnieuw een bedrijf opbouwen. Het zal iets anders zijn dan de vorige keer. Met een link met Mexico, met een mix tussen ventures en klantenwerk… maar ondernemen en spannende projecten doen zullen we!
Ik zoek in België en in Mexico getalenteerde designers die mee willen werken aan een nieuw verhaal. In februari reis ik voor een paar weken naar België om met een aantal mensen samen te zitten en plannen te smeden.
I would like to take a stand against “design systems” as standalone work; meetings to “officialize” components and designers building three tier token systems that most likely will just get ignored by other team members.
I believe that for some teams, the design systems pendulum has swung too far. We have people spending days and days on a type of work that doesn’t really help a company forward, when they should be solving real product problems instead.
Design systems were invented to solve the problem of having to debate the minutae of basic design components like buttons and inputs. However, some practictioners have now made it their job to endlessly debate those components, and waste company time on trivialities.
Maybe it’s some of the people I follow online; maybe I am overstating the problem; feel free to give me feedback on the post. But this is something that’s been in the back of my mind. I wonder if others have similar thoughts.
Don’t get me wrong: surely, within a bigger company, there is a role for design systems designers. Multiple people at larger companies like Github, Adobe and Figma needs to deal with the intricacies of the many components and variations to make sure the software as a whole is the best it can be.
For those companies, the surface area of their software is vast and complex and there are effiency gains in thinking in systems.
It makes total sense to think about design patterns, to document the logic behind components and to communicate about them.
Where I think the pendulum has swung too far is that for some companies, there is an intricate belief that truly need a design system when in fact they are way too small to actually need one.
Those companies would overall be better served by taking a more flexible approach to the work itself.
This is coming from a designer who has worked on several large scale design systems over the years, powering software for millions of users.
I see a pattern in design system case studies, where a design challenge is immediately seen as a design systems challenge.
For example in this recent case study I read, the designers worked on a bunch of desktop components. When the question came how to work for mobile, and later for a touchscreen point of sale system, that question was seem as a design system question.
This, when in fact they should maybe have just designed specifically for that use case, learned lessons, and perhaps extract them into small systems. Not the other way around.
The reality is that combining too many systems overcomplicates them. Some things should just be left as standalone systems. Shopify learned this lesson years ago when famously, someone had to order a couch for the office and chose a design system colour. The design system became this rigid object in the company that everything had to accord to.
“But does it fit the system?” was being asked all the time. That question slowed down projects immensely, shifted responsibility to the design system, when the designers should have just… designed.
Imagine a company with 4 web apps, 1 mobile app, 1 plugin and 1 touchscreen POS style app. The risk is that the design systems team spends an inordinate amount of time on making sure they have a perfect ”system”, that works for all use cases.
In practice, in Figma, this sometimes means building huge libraries, with sizing tokens that work for all use cases, different type scales within the same file (for desktop, mobile and large touch surfaces), dealing with external plugins like Token Studio to deal with the added complexity, in turn making everything even more complex.
In programming, duplication is sometimes much better than abstraction, and you can apply a very similar thought to design systems. Maybe it’s better to duplicate the brand colours into different libraries, instead of trying to create multi-tiered libraries with too many abstraction levels.
What bothers me too is the “meta work” that these types of decisions also create.
In some companies that means long meetings about components to arrive at the conclusions of most of the giants anyway, reimplementing the same thing over and over again. The very problem that the design system intended to solve (why reimplement a button… again?) becomes its own piece of work that is then infinitely repeated as new designers enter the company with their own form of not-invented-here syndrome.
Furthermore expanding the problem, the examples referenced are often from companies working at a much larger scale. When their work is copied, the smaller company is left with a solution that was designed to work at a much bigger scale.
I get it, sometimes at work you need to look busy and show results, but some designers should ask themselves if they are not simply pushing pixels for the sake of avoiding the real work.
I find that a part of designer’s work rarely gets checked by stakeholders, and some designers get by for months, making a good amount of money pushing mostly useless pixels, listening to Spotify instead of to users.
What I see designers building then is this complex house of cards that topples over when the real world hits. When the app has to be implemented, the dev barely knows how to navigate Figma and they get this 7000 token-monstrosity instead of the +-100 design tokens they need to implement the project.
In the name of consistency and systems, some designers forfeit simplicity and clear communication. They are throwing a bible of docs over the wall — oh, here’s our Zeroheight website of 70 pages! — and wonder why the other party “doesn’t get it”. At the same time, they wonder why their managers “won’t spend more budget on the design systems team”.
The truth is that there is a very thin line between design system work that adds holistic value and design system work that is essentially just busywork.
This is a hard subject to discuss, and I am sure I will get a lot of flak for posting this, but someone needs to say it: the vast majority of design systems work is busywork.
My advice:
For managers: be careful that what your team is doing is not just reinventing the wheel with another name.
For designers: do some soul-searching and think about what would be useful to drive your product forward. Don’t endlessly iterate on the design system, work on the actual user experience instead. Talk to your devs and build relationships, don’t create a complex house of cards and endless docs nobody will read.
For devs: see through the web of abstractions if delivered a complex system and try to implement the simplest system possible. Your codebase has different abstraction patterns than a design app anyway.
Yesterday was my last day at Doccle, and I’ve been asked what I’m going to do now. Over the past few months I’ve been thinking about this. As I talked about in my “choose your own adventure” blog posts, different options were in my head: a full-time position at a US company; an agency; founding a product company.
A month of wedding things is coming up, but after that, the plan is to go the agency route, and work on making Obra Studio a bigger design studio.
The main focus will be on providing high-quality design services. This has always been my strength.
I also really enjoy putting together a clear offer for a project and then executing on that offer. The offer brings clarity to what is going to happen, and it creates a clear deal. I place a super high value on clear project offers and subsequent execution.
Next to design services there will be certain product offerings, such as a Figma course and paid software utilities. The focus of those utilities would be to help reach a higher level of craft.
Since I can be a permanent resident in Mexico now, I can now form a company here and start having employees.
I want to keep my Belgian company to work with employees and freelancers in Belgium and to easily bill in euros to Belgian companies. On the Belgian company side we would focus on having a team of high-quality designers to work on the right interface design projects.
The Mexican company would house certain costs like WordPress/Craft CMS dev freelancers, graphic and motion designers, some front-end tasks and more.
The combination thereof will allow us to be more of a full-service company with a cost saving aspect for certain types of work. For example for certain tasks such as WordPress website maintenance, converting designs to HTML/CSS/React or certain graphic design the same quality of Belgian work can be attained at much less of a cost.
To be honest, if I see big name Belgian agencies taking weeks to implement a basic feature in a website and then overcharging for that privilege, and then ship work with bugs, I am sure I can do much, much better.
Sometimes I dream of the US as a market but it’s hard to “get in”. As I talked about before, I feel like innovation is coming out of the US. All the tech I’ve been excited about the past few months came out of US-based companies.
My network is almost entirely Belgian. With Mono we sometimes worked for international companies (I remember Japanese, Chinese, Swiss and US clients) but over 80% of our project revenue was from Belgian companies. With some travel to the US for networking purposes, my plan is to attain more clients in this time zone and to have a good balance between clients from Belgium and clients from the US.
An interesting dynamic when having both a team in Belgium and a team in Mexico is that you can basically work around the clock due to the time difference. If I can find someone I really vibe with design-wise, we can riff of each other’s designs while keeping sane working hours. This can allow us to sell design sprints with the added advantage of more speed.
My current thinking is that budgets from clients in Mexico might be too low, but to be honest, I have to explore the market and see what I can get. I am sure high-end clients like BBVA or funded startups like Nu have the right budgets for design. There is also a ton of investment in Mexico right now.
To get started, I would like to have a co-founder/other designer on the ground in Belgium. This needs to be a great designer and a skilled communicator, with the ability to take projects into their own hands.
Being able to meet live will be needed for certain types of workshops and meetings. Clients prefer to see each other in real life, and realistically I will only be in Belgium for +-1 month per year. The person would also have to be skilled at working remotely – this is not something everyone is that good at. It requires good writing, clear communication and following up on your tasks.
In my dreams we go back to a bigger team, and I am able to invite the Belgian team to come to Mexico or the other way around for a team event.
I am thinking of working out of a nicely designed office, servicing clients with high-quality design, eating delicious tacos together, holding local design community events… basically a return to what I’ve been doing with Mono, but now bigger, better, and with a big Mexican influence. Vámonos!
Does any of this speak to you? Let’s talk. Book a call via cal.com/wolfr/30min.
