Design Engineer · Kuala Lumpur · GMT+8
One person, from the first sketch to deployed code — usually two to three weeks. I work on interfaces where the domain is genuinely hard: trading, risk, agent tooling. Anything where the data is dense and being wrong is expensive.
Twelve years in design, seven on product interfaces. The last two in fintech.
The system, running
Change either control. One attribute moves on one element, and twelve components retune — spacing, type, colour, row height. No component knows which theme it is in; they all read the same semantic tokens. That is the whole argument for a token layer, and it is easier to operate than to describe.
| Instrument | Class | Weight | P&L |
|---|---|---|---|
| NVDA | Equity | 4.21% | +2.84% |
| DE 10Y | Fixed income | 2.08% | -0.31% |
| USD/JPY | FX | 1.44% | +0.12% |
Theme
Density
What just changed
These values are read back out of the browser after every change, so they cannot claim something the specimen is not using. Note that the panel keeps its own theme inside this page — scoping was designed in long before there was a reason for it.
Work
All four are self-initiated. Client work is under NDA, and I would rather show you something I can talk about honestly — including the parts that went wrong.
01
That I understand the shape of agent products — and can make five surfaces agree by deriving them from one source instead of maintaining five.
Killer detail
Replayable execution trace
Stack
Next.js · React 19
Built in
~2 days
02
That dense financial data can stay legible, and that the keyboard can do everything the mouse does.
Killer detail
Brushing re-runs every panel
Rows
2,000 virtualised
Built in
~1 day
03
That I build the layer other people build on — and that I make a real product consume it first.
Killer detail
Two independent axes
Tokens
64 primitive · 37 semantic
Built in
~2 days
04
That something can look expensive without being expensive, and that performance claims are measured.
Killer detail
120fps, 0 asset bytes
Draw calls
3
Built in
~half a day
What I do
$12k – $35k
2 – 4 weeks
A real surface of your product, designed and shipped. Not a Figma file for someone else to interpret — a running application your team can pull and extend.
Best whenYou have engineers but no one who owns how it looks and feels.
$10k – $25k
2 – 3 weeks
A token layer, a component library, and a documentation site — plus one of your real products refactored onto it, because a system nothing runs on is a set of guesses.
Best whenYour interface drifts a little further apart with every sprint.
$100 – $200 / hr
Ongoing
Design and front-end capacity on your team for a stretch. Useful before a launch, during a rebuild, or when a founder is still doing the design and would rather not be.
Best whenYou need the capacity now and the scope is still moving.
Fixed price against a written scope, agreed before any money moves. Anything that changes the date or the price gets an amendment in writing first.
How it works
01
You email me a brief; the button fills in the questions so you are answering rather than composing. I come back with an honest read on whether I am the right person, a written scope, a fixed price and a date. Then we talk, to confirm it rather than to discover it. Everything that matters is on paper before anyone gets on a call, which means you can forward it to whoever signs off without translating a conversation.
Two working days
02
You see work in progress two or three times a week, in a link you can click rather than a deck. Feedback lands while it is still cheap to act on. No two-week silence ending in a reveal.
Week 1
03
Because the same person does both, there is no handover to lose things in, and no design that turns out to be impractical three weeks after it was approved. What you review is running code.
Weeks 1 – 3
04
The repository, the design system, and a written record of why each decision went the way it did. Your team should be able to extend the work without needing me — that is the point.
Final week
I am in Kuala Lumpur. My evening is a European morning, so there is real overlap with the UK and the EU. For US teams the overlap is thin — which means I work the way remote work is supposed to work: written updates, a clickable build every couple of days, and meetings only when a decision genuinely needs one. Most weeks that is zero.
0h
Who you would be working with
Twelve years in design, seven of them on product interfaces. Four and a half were on high-volume consumer platforms, where one extra tap was a number somebody measured, and the last two and a half in fintech — a forex broker, then a global payments group. Before any of that I did print and brand work, which is where I learned that a layout nobody can produce is not a design.
In 2019 the team I was on still designed in Photoshop and handed flat files to developers. I taught myself Adobe XD in my own time, ran it on one project, and was then asked to move all seven designers across. I am doing the same thing now with a different set of tools. The distance between what gets designed and what gets built is the expensive part, and closing it has been the actual job for seven years regardless of what the title said.
I work in English and Mandarin and have spent years in the middle of the two — writing technical design documentation in Mandarin for a development team in China while agreeing strategy in English with marketing in Singapore. If your engineering is offshore, that is not a small thing. My written English is strong and my spoken English is workmanlike, which is one reason everything here starts in writing.
I work as one person on purpose. Design and implementation in the same pair of hands removes the handover, which is where most of the cost and nearly all of the compromise usually lives.
I use it heavily. It is the reason a two-person job takes one person two weeks.
It is also why the market is now full of people who can generate a competent-looking interface in an afternoon. So the honest question is not whether I use it — it is what I add on top.
What I add is the review. Knowing that a design system with no product running on it is a set of guesses. That a correlation matrix computed once is quietly lying to you. That a grid which drops keypresses under key repeat will be found by a trader on day one and never trusted again. None of those are visible in a screenshot, and none of them get caught by the generating.
Twelve years is what makes the review worth paying for. The AI is a faster pencil.
Straight answers
No. All four are self-initiated concepts, built to show how I work rather than to dress up somebody else’s product. Client work is under NDA and I would rather show you something I can talk about honestly, including the parts that went wrong.
A repository you own, deployed and running, plus the design system it is built on and a written record of the decisions. Not a Figma file with a handover meeting attached.
That is the usual arrangement. I take a surface end to end and stay inside your conventions — your stack, your review process, your component library if you have one worth keeping.
It usually does. Small changes get absorbed. Anything that moves the date or the price gets a written amendment before I start on it, so there is no invoice at the end that you did not see coming.
Rarely, and only when it genuinely fits. The value here is the two together — separating them puts back the handover I am charging you to remove.
Next step
Send a brief — the button prefills the questions, so it is a fill-in rather than a blank page. Two working days to a scope and a fixed price. If I am not the right person I will say so, and I usually know someone who is.