Thoughts & insights
Blog
Design leadership, remote teams, and nearshore product design.
AI for design directors: sales decks, reports, and marketing assets
How a design director uses AI to produce sales decks, executive reports, and marketing assets at startup speed—design as a multiplier across business functions.
Digital to physical: AI concepts, materials, and fabrication mindset
Digital fabrication exploration: AI concepts to printed objects, material tradeoffs, and how making builds stronger design leadership confidence.
Figma MCP + AI: design tokens from variables to production JSON
How Figma MCP and AI keep design tokens in sync across code, internal tools, and brand assets—one JSON source of truth for every platform.
From Figma to filament: why I 3D print as a product designer
How 3D printing and physical fabrication sharpen product design thinking—tolerances, iteration loops, and the constraints that screens never teach you.
How design leadership accelerates startup speed-to-market
How design leadership accelerates startups—reducing rework, AI-powered workflows, and design systems that let engineers ship without design bottlenecks.
Nearshore design leadership: the LATAM advantage for US startups
What US startups gain from a nearshore LATAM design director—diverse perspective, different ways of thinking, and real-time collaboration at competitive rates.
Peridio & Avocado OS: semantic tokens and AI-native design systems
Semantic design tokens for Peridio and Avocado OS: surfaces, complementary intent colors, and JSON-first specs that let AI and Figma stay aligned.
The designer's maker lab: CAD, 3D printing, and woodworking
Why every designer should build a home maker lab—Fusion 360, 3D printing, and woodworking teach physical constraints and design instincts that sharpen digital work.
AI-assisted design workflows: what actually works in 2026
Which AI tools genuinely improve product design workflows in 2026, which are still hype, and the patterns that make AI a multiplier for experienced designers.
Branching strategies for design-engineering collaboration
How to structure feature branches, coordinate design token updates in code, and manage releases cleanly between design and engineering teams at any scale.
Design as a fundraising multiplier: decks, brand, and investor trust
Why startups that invest in design across pitch decks, one-pagers, landing pages, video, and their full brand experience raise more effectively and build investor conviction.
Design as the creative hub: where every team does their best work
How design became the cross-functional hub where product, engineering, and marketing collaborate—FigJam workflows and remote rituals that actually stick.
Design systems at scale: lessons from Nestlé and AstraZeneca
What I learned leading design systems for global enterprises—governance, adoption, token strategy, and scaling across brands, regions, and dozens of product teams.
Engineering concepts for everyday life: redundancy, MVPs, and kanban
How software engineering frameworks like redundancy, modularity, continuous improvement, and MVPs quietly improve the way you live—practical systems thinking beyond code.
Git for designers: rebase, amend, and how to earn engineering trust
A practical guide to git rebase, amend, feature branches, and clean commit history—from a design director who works in the terminal every day.
GitHub Actions and CI/CD: a designer's guide to automated deployments
How to set up automated builds, preview deployments, and accessibility linting with GitHub Actions—demystifying CI/CD pipelines for design-technical roles.
How Head of Design and Head of Marketing actually collaborate
How to use Linear to align design and marketing on campaigns, launches, and brand work—shared projects, explicit phases, and no cross-functional chaos at startup speed.
How I embed in engineering teams as a design director
Concrete patterns for participating in sprints, reviewing PRs, pairing with engineers, and building deep trust as a design leader inside development teams.
How I structure remote design teams for US startups
Practical patterns for building and leading distributed design teams that ship product with US-based startups—ownership models, time-zone overlap, and communication rituals that work.
Nearshore design leadership: why US companies hire in LATAM
Why US startups hire nearshore design directors from Latin America—time-zone overlap, senior leadership quality, and real cost efficiency without the usual tradeoffs.
Prompt engineering for designers: beyond the chatbot
How structured prompts transform design research, code scaffolding, content generation, and documentation—practical AI patterns every design practitioner should know.
Running your own servers as a designer: what I learned
Why understanding servers, deployments, and infrastructure end-to-end makes you a more effective design leader—and practical steps to get started without becoming a sysadmin.
Ship landing pages in hours: Cursor, Claude Code, and GitHub
How design and marketing use Claude Code to scaffold pages fast, Cursor for visual precision, and GitHub to ship landing pages at startup speed without handoff delays.
The design engineer: code, 3D printing, and hybrid design practice
A case for hybrid design practice—how 3D printing, AI workflows, git, servers, and dev collaboration compound into more effective design leadership and better product work.
What I learned founding a Figma design community in LATAM
How building a 500+ designer community across Latin America on Discord taught me about open collaboration, shared knowledge, and the compounding value of giving freely.