Founding designer (2024–not going anywhere soon)
I joined Stephen to build
Paper as its founding designer, and have worked on practically every
user-facing part of Paper since.
These days I am usually building out the core experience and
features of the editor itself. It’s a blast.
Creative direction (2026)
I was looking for a monospace font to display element measurements
in Paper’s editor, and couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a
classy, neutral one that looked as good as we’d hoped for, so we
decided to commission our own dream monospace.
I worked with the type designer
Guido Ferreyra to make it
a reality. Geist Mono looked like it had good bones, but it’s
anything but neutral. We used it as a starting point to create a
fantastic general-purpose font for design and code.
Special thanks to Agu for the
hard work on Paper Mono’s website and physical type specimen.
Contributor (2024)
A short stint with some of the best UI engineers in the world,
helping the team design the API and build the docs of what’s now the
most popular React component library. I’m glad to see it become a
successor to Radix and a new home for its original ideas.
I wish there were 48 hours in a day so I could keep working on Base
UI, but I joined Paper shortly afterward, as it was irresistible.
UI engineer (2022–2024)
We joined WorkOS when it
acquired Modulz. At
WorkOS, I designed and built the developer docs and dashboard, among
other things, and led the UI engineering practice.
Design and engineering (2023–2024)
We’d long wanted to create an opinionated set of styled components
on top of Radix Primitives.
Benoit and I ported and
extended the new design system I had built for WorkOS products to
create Radix Themes.
Product designer (2019–2022)
These were the good old days for me and most other people involved.
Modulz was a visual code editor for designers (now what isn’t these
days?). I joined Modulz as one of the early team members, working on
the design editor. I was lucky enough to learn React from the best,
and have some of the Radix team’s engineering taste rub off on me.
Design (2021)
A marketing website I designed and built for Radix. I’m surprised
how well the details there still hold up. Hope it sticks around
for a little longer—I don’t work on marketing often.
Design (2021)
Together with Colm, I worked
to develop a coherent color system to solve one of the many
headaches of user interface design. In Radix Colors, every color
step in the scale serves the same functional purpose across
different hues.
I’m particularly proud of the tool I built for generating and
tweaking the color scales in lockstep; it’s probably lost
somewhere in the mists of the git history. One day, I’ll build
it again.
Design (2021)
A crisp set of high-quality, pixel-perfect 15×15 icons that I
started designing for Modulz and kept going.
People often ask me (twice or thrice, which counts as often): why
did we do 15×15 and not some boring size like 16×16 or 24×24? The
answer is now irrelevant, as I’ve changed my mind since. Those
other sizes are also wrong, by the way.
Earlier work
2012–2019
I started as a self-taught web and graphic designer in
Odesa, Ukraine. I
worked at a few places over those years, mostly with agencies
or freelance.
There was some great work that is regrettably no longer around, and
some work that I hope is no longer around.
Before that, I was studying computer engineering at university, but
decided to drop out a couple years in because I wasn’t liking
technology much. How the tables have turned!