About

Design systems teams use

At byrd I built the ByrdView design system from scratch, as the only designer, on 10% of my weekly time. A year later it let us ship a full redesign of the admin platform and mobile app in about 2 months, against a 2-quarter estimate.

At Inverse I keep building fully tokenized design systems, now with AI assistance.

Design in code

I've built what I design since my first web job in 2004. Today I design mostly in the browser, prototype in code and use Figma for visual craft and collaboration. I bring engineers in from the first day, and I set up design-to-code pipelines for clients.

This site is built in code too: tokens, plain CSS and no framework. Three themes run on one set of tokens.

AI-native work

I design AI-native and agentic products for tech and automotive clients. I test AI patterns with real users: when they trust the AI, when they step in, and what happens when it's wrong.

That's the "Agentic Whisperer" in my title. I use AI agents across my design and code work: I set up the workflows, brief the agents and check what they make. When no standard tool fits, I build my own. I also mentor design teams on working this way.

The client work is under NDA, so it isn't on this site. I'm happy to walk you through it in a call.

Leading designers

I've hired and led design teams: five designers at Visual Meta, three at byrd. At byrd that meant goals, reviews and career paths as well as the design work.

Own projects

Trellis is a proof of concept that checks a design system from outside a project: contrast for every theme, then accessibility and screenshots for every Storybook story. It ran on Ghost's design system, 487 stories, with nothing added to their code. It's parked and private, so I show it in a call.

Greengo is a small green cowboy robot who rides along in Claude Code and narrates what the agent is doing. You see at a glance when the agent is working, when something failed and when it needs you.

Vector Arcade is two small browser games in TypeScript, with no game engine.

Background

20+ years, from print to product to design in code.

Now

Inverse Design Studio, lead product designer and engineer, since 2025

2020–24

byrd technologies, senior then lead product designer

2020

Visual Meta, design lead

2018–20

Sauce Labs, senior UX designer on a developer-facing testing platform

2015–18

Berlin start-ups (SharePop, Advanon, Shopd.io), up to head of UI/UX

2003–15

Croatia: graphic design, web and front-end, and my own studio

Before

Singer and songwriter in Fruštuk, a band in Croatia. We released an album, Monotonija.