Five years designing products. The thing that actually compounds isn't skill. It's the system underneath.
Hey, I'm Dani. I design products. I'm based in Jakarta, and right now I'm the Founding Designer at Abadikan. I also keep my own studio, SyroPixel, running on the side. That's me on paper.
The honest version is shorter. I spent five years making interfaces pretty before I figured out the trick. The trick is this: the surface is downstream of the system.
Here's what I mean. Early in my career I'd redesign a screen, ship it, feel proud, then watch it slowly fall apart over the next year. New flows didn't fit. Edge cases broke the layout. Someone added a button that didn't belong. Every time, I blamed the next person. Every time, it was my fault — because I shipped a screen, not a system.
Now I work the other way around. Tokens first. Then components. Then screens. The boring stuff under the surface is what survives the rebrand, the new PM, the v2, and the v3. The surface is just what you see this week.
Different industries, same lesson, twenty-plus times in a row. SaaS dashboards. Fintech wallets. Healthcare workflows. A construction-tech MVP that landed pre-seed funding. A crypto trading interface I'm still proud of. I keep showing up to the same problem: you can't scale taste, but you can scale a system that protects it.
Where I am now
- 2025 — now Founding Designer · Abadikan I do everything. Brand, marketing, product, the design system that holds it all together. I sit with the founders and we figure out what to build before we build it.
- 2023 — now Product Designer · SyroPixel My own studio. 20+ projects shipped. One of them — a computer vision MVP for a construction-tech startup — earned its pre-seed funding. That one I'm proud of.
Where I've been
- 2024 — 2026 Product Designer · The Design Factory (London) 15+ SaaS and company-profile projects. Weekly feedback loops with the Creative Director. London hours, Jakarta desk.
- 2023 — 2025 Dribbble Shot Team · Kretya Studio Helped grow the studio account to 3.4M views and +4,900 followers. Two and a half years of showing up. That's the whole trick. There isn't a shortcut.
- 2023 UI Designer (Crypto) · Kretya Studio Crypto wallets. Security-first interfaces. My first real design system, end to end.
- 2023 — 2024 UI/UX Designer · Upwork 10+ client projects. This is where I learned to write — fast replies, clear handoffs, decisions in plain English.
- 2021 — 2022 UI/UX Designer · Lumoshive 10+ projects. Landing pages, mobile apps, CMS work. This is where I learned to read a Figma file the way a developer reads it.
- 2020 — 2021 Graphic Designer (Intern) · Hypernet Technologies My first real job. Made me realize brand and product can't live in two different folders.
What I write about
I publish on Medium. UI/UX patterns, freelance lessons, and how AI is sorting designers instead of replacing them. A few that did well lately:
- Mar 2026 Training design judgment How to read products like a senior designer. The skill AI can't copy.
- Mar 2026 Product designers are not being replaced. They're being sorted. The question isn't whether AI replaces you. It's which side of the split you land on.
- Feb 2026 Figma MCP and the rise of AI-first design systems For years our design and dev process looked the same. That's about to change.
Good design is about impact, not just looks.
Things I believe (subject to change)
Most “design problems” are system problems wearing makeup. Fix the system, the design fixes itself.
Taste is real, but it's a trailing indicator. The leading indicator is whether you can explain your decision out loud without sounding embarrassed. If you can't, change the decision.
A portfolio that takes a position is more useful than one that lists everything you've done. I'm still working on this one.
The basics
What I'm focused on this week is on /now. The tools I actually use are on /uses. How this site is built — and why — is in /colophon.
Thanks for reading this far. Most don't.