some news. i'm changing career paths. six plus years of building from zero. early design hire at a crypto unicorn. head of design at a defi lab that went from a hackathon project to hundreds of millions in tvl. led the design of exchanges and other technical products single-handedly from scratch. co-founded a design tool startup that reached 1.3m+ users with no marketing spend. co-founded a venture studio and exited through acquisition and more. wore several hats at once across startups, studios and agencies. everywhere i went, the work shipped and the outcomes showed up. 200+ prototypes and projects shipped, still counting. 10+ teams joined as founding designer, setting the foundation and the alignment from zero and leading the work from the front. helped founders scale the business, revenue, company, creative and design operations behind it. i'm still building my own ideas/things and i've loved every part of it. but i've come to the point in my life where my life and my self demand a different version of me. different creative challenges and more. so i want to go all in and have a strong impact on one company. whether it's a more established startup or an earlier stage one. i'm now actively looking for founding designer, design lead or creative director roles. 0→1 is where i do my best work. i'm excited to work collectively as a team on something worthwhile, and i feel i can add a lot of value. earlier stage or more established, either works. no rush, no need. i'm optimising for growth, creative freedom and problems that are actually hard. dm open

i support this a lot, and i genuinely love this take. i’ve always bought commercial assets, resources, and design packs to support creators. i’ve even donated extra money to creators because i value the time, thought, and craft that goes into making these resources. i’m saying this publicly because these resources have helped me, my creative process, and my business a lot. sometimes clients suggest assets or resources they love, and i’m always happy to explore and integrate them into projects when they make sense. i have huge respect for the people who design, build, and share these resources with the world. supporting creators and using ai aren’t mutually exclusive. for me, it’s about respecting the craft while finding better ways to create. i also wrote about how i think about creative leverage here: 0xdragoon.xyz/writing/buildi…

love seeing people push ai this way. ai has been nothing short of magical for me. working on projects like pixora and neura has shown me how much further i can push my ideas when i bring ai into my creative process. i can explore more directions, experiment with things i wouldn’t have attempted before, and turn ideas that once felt impossible into something real. it hasn’t replaced my creativity. it’s expanded it. i feel more focused, more curious, and more willing to take creative risks. the real magic is still in the taste, the art direction, the decisions, and knowing what to make in the first place. and honestly, i’ve started blocking people who think everything made with ai is slop, or that using ai somehow makes you less of a designer. you don’t have to like every ai-generated thing, but dismissing an entire creative medium without understanding how people use it is just lazy. i’m here to create things i couldn’t create before, not to convince everyone to agree with me. good work @camworboys :)

crazy good, try it → gridform.app

hikolabs/.genesis - 0→1 brand, strategy & positioning.

i’m heading to @EFDevcon and would love to connect with founders, builders, and teams pushing things forward. 6+ years in crypto, and the excitement is still the same. the thrill of building, meeting people who think differently, and seeing what this ecosystem can become never really gets old. share your favorite side events, dinners, meetups, or anything good happening around devcon. always up for meeting good people and having great conversations. if you’re building or launching something, or need a hand with product, design, strategy, or just want to bounce around ideas, my dms are open. happy to connect and help where i can. see you around. 🤝

2 weeks to @EFDevcon 🚀

funny how design dies every other week, but the announcement always needs a campaign.

some of the companies, startups, and agencies i worked with years ago have shut down, while others are flying. i've seen the hype, the cycles, and the reality behind building businesses. i've worked w/ | followed founders closely through their highs, lows, pivots, and everything in between. you start to see that every journey looks different, and success rarely happens in a straight line. every failure and every success has taught me something valuable. each experience is shaping how i think, build, and make decisions today, and helping me become a better version of myself for the future.

this one hit close to home. the procedural to architectural spectrum is exactly how my brain already sorts creative work, i just never had a name for it. i work with a stack: ai to move fast and explore, paid commercial license creative resources and assets for the quality you can’t prompt your way into, custom tools to scale what works, and my own judgment on top deciding what actually ships. gridform ( gridform.app ) started from the same instinct. swiss posters are beautiful and painfully slow to make, so i built a browser tool with 265 grid-locked layouts and a shuffle button. there’s no signup and no backend. people liked it more than i expected, and it’s turning into a studio where small agentic design tools chain together and live in one store. that’s the split for me: i build the tools in gridform, and at mainarc ( mainarc.xyz ) i study why taste still beats them. production is free now. judgment isn’t. and when a client falls for a tool we built and gives the green light, it doesn’t sit in a handoff folder. it becomes a resource anyone can use. you build the system once and it keeps making things. huge respect to @ayushsoni_io and the @helloHEX team for showing the messy middle.

today, i'm re-announcing gridform: creative studio it is here: gridform.app/home