fintech

After 5 years as VALK's sole designer, I realized I want to build, not just design. On the gap between what I designed and what shipped - and what comes next.

Five years into product design at a fintech, the majority of my work is documentation, edge cases, and maintenance. This is what senior design actually looks like.

After 4 years as VALK's sole designer, a major pivot taught me what happens when the product you built quietly gets deprecated - and how to stay.

After 2 years at a Moscow agency and 4 years as sole designer at a fintech, here's what actually changes when you go from agency to product design.

What four years as the sole designer on a fintech product teaches you about depth, restraint, and the trade-offs agency work never prepares you for.

Lessons from implementing WCAG 2.1 AA compliance in regulated financial software - data tables, chart contrast, focus management, and the institutional sales reality.

How I redesigned Merlin by VALK for the Ledger Live integration - two audiences, two design systems, and a compressed timeline.

I moved from Istanbul to LA and found the same Figma files waiting. Reflections on nomadic remote work, timezone pain, and why stability matters for design.

What I learned designing VALK's platform across 15 countries - date formats, RTL, regulatory UI rules, and how to structure Figma for regional variants.

Three years of enterprise B2B design at VALK with almost no user research access - and the proxy methods that replaced it.

After 2 years maintaining a solo design system at VALK, I found the real problems are organizational - not technical. Here's what I got wrong.

How I designed Merlin by VALK - a DeFi analytics tool built for traditional finance professionals who don't speak crypto-native language.

Lessons from designing financial data tables for institutional investors - density, sorting, accessibility, and why every table becomes a spreadsheet.

What breaks when your fintech design system grows from 7 clients to 70+ institutions fast - tokens, variants, documentation, and saying no.

After VALK closed its seed round in December 2020, everything I was working on suddenly changed. Here's what funding actually does to a startup's design work.

8 months into designing a fintech platform with zero financial background - how domain ignorance slows you down and unexpectedly helps you.

Six months into my first startup role, I rebuilt VALK's product from an engineer-built MVP. Here's what went wrong and what actually worked.

I joined fintech startup as sole product designer right before COVID. Working remote from Bali during quarantine taught me things about design process I did not expect.