Two halves of the same habit. How a project actually gets run, and what I read, keep and come back to while running it.
13,000 users, and retention still falling off inside a week. Our North Star was measuring the wrong thing.
The UI had fallen behind 2024–2025 practice, and onboarding and matching needed rethinking.
Sat with the founder: downloads → neighbourhood density. Changed what shipped for the next year.
28.5% average cost of goods, labour held under 30%.
Six surfaces, thirty specified screens. One field — the home hood — that every surface reads.
A full Design System, Component Library, UI update, plus new onboarding and matching flows.
180 seats and a $100K CAD ceiling, including the net lease for the first 12 months. Front and back of house, with admin automated through Notion, ChatGPT and Toast for cost effectiveness.
Priority list scoped to engineering capacity, not to the wish list. Owned the specs and ran the walkthroughs. Guerilla usability testing first, then formal User Testing on actual pet owners.
Design system first, built in Figma. The UI and the new onboarding and matching flows were rebuilt on top of it.
Open within two months of signing the lease, inside the three-month rent-free period: permits, licences, hiring, training and SOPs. Then positive cash flow within six months.
Onboarding completion reached 65–75% at launch in 2025.
Positive cash flow in four months, two ahead of plan.
In progress. So far tokens.js — the design system rebuilt so engineering reads the same values — and a sequenced nine-project roadmap.
The first Figma design system, which Neighbourhoods later rebuilt and propagated into tokens.js.
A business that ran without me, which is why it could be sold.
Fourteen months at Swave Studios, May 2022 to July 2023, doing product design on an agency team, client work on a schedule I did not set, and handoffs to engineering. Where I learned what a spec has to contain before anyone can build from it.
On Pawmates I wrote the specs and ran the walkthroughs myself, and scoped the priority list to what the team could actually absorb.
I write production code. rosa-morada.western.casa is Next.js 14, TypeScript, Supabase and Tailwind, live with a paying client. Row-level security at the database. A deterministic scoring function with the rubric version pinned per record.
I also opened a PR against trycompai/comp fixing dark mode in their UI package, after finding a live WCAG AA contrast failure.
A design critique after every working session, against the intent I named at the start. It is a discipline I run on my own work.
My point of view as a multi-cultural, poly-reference designer.
Hover a photo to trace it
Hover a photo.
Each line says how two photos relate: an echo, a tension, or a correction where one does the job better.
The web24 photos · 21 connections
Same Material, Different Job
Correction. Clay lamps does it better.
EchoTensionCorrection, dot on the stronger
Drawn from
Studied
My habits for growing and exploring as a designer. Creation is a state you enter, like typing commands into a terminal, dialing to a frequency, or mixing paint to get a colour.
04 · Rituals
RIT-01
Noise
Sixty-one points, no arrangement. Before any of the inputs.
random signal
The frameworks I use to engage life and work.
Hover an orbit or a phase · tap the centre
Four phases
Every cycle runs the same four. What changes between them is the period — and what the goal is made of.