I’m Vladimir, Vlad to most people. Anyone who sits down to a gongfu cha session with me (even though it’s just me in the video) gets a very delicious crash course in Taiwanese high mountain oolongs and sheng pu’erh.
I live in Toronto with my wife, a musician, and our little boy. By trade I’m a product designer: twenty-odd years across editorial, experience and product work. Most of what those years taught me is to find the right question before reaching for an answer.
Outside of screens I make things with my hands. There are no dark UX patterns in a dovetail joint, but plenty of beautiful ones in chiyogami to bind books with.
The rest of the time I’m keeping my Spanish sharp at a weekly class, losing afternoons to art history and museums with my kid in tow, and listening to post-rock that takes eight minutes to get where it’s going. Tea, wood, paper, paintings, languages: it’s all the same habit, finding the door to wonder in whatever’s in front of me.
[ scroll for resume ]Senior Product Designer with over twenty years across editorial, web, and product design — the last seven focused on native mobile and SaaS platforms. Skilled at translating complex workflows into elegant, user-centered solutions, collaborating closely with engineering and product teams, and contributing to cohesive design systems. Experienced in SaaS and enterprise workflows, design operations, and AI-augmented product development, from multi-agent orchestration and automated pipelines to structured decision frameworks - with a focus on accessibility, usability, and cross-platform consistency.
Independent product design across AI-assisted tools and small-business platforms. Led product design for Pharos, an AI job-search tool, specified down to its data structures and scoring logic. Also provides UX/UI audits for AI-driven startups, where human judgement and taste catch what the models miss.
Senior member of a four-person design team for native iOS and Android applications within a subscription-based digital platform, with additional responsibility for web surfaces. Managed two designers while partnering closely with Product, Engineering, and Marketing to deliver iterative improvements across discovery, onboarding, account management, subscription logic, playback, and checkout workflows. Developed a modular browse system enabling scalable content presentation and feature iteration, operating within accessibility (WCAG) and legacy technical constraints. Following the 2022 Storytel acquisition, led the team through a migration from Adobe XD to Figma, a shared design system and componentized web, a website redesign, and the localized Audiolibros relaunch for Latin America.
Led creative direction and a team of four designers across four monthly business journals, then Canadian Business Journal alone as the company consolidated, more than 55,000 pages over eight years. Designed and illustrated covers and lead stories alongside the team, and led coordination of up to 20 company profiles an issue with editors, advertisers and the companies themselves, including U.K.-based sales and editorial teams. Managed full production cycles from concept through delivery, developing and maintaining design systems across multiple titles while coordinating with editorial, advertising, and communications teams.
Coordinated web platform development in partnership with engineering, contributing to site architecture, usability improvements, and subscription-based e-commerce workflows. Designed and refined user flows supporting account management, checkout, and content discovery within an early-stage digital product environment. Led a team of four designers.
Designed and optimized multi-step mortgage application and form-based workflows within a financial services context, improving clarity and structure of complex data-entry processes in collaboration with development teams.
Front-end design and build for the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care’s long-term care facilities site and the Social Housing Services Corporation member portal.
Independent design studio for commercial and non-profit clients. Projects across consumer software, e-commerce, health research, hospitality, the arts and community organizations, from branding and identity to websites and online storefront templates.
Concept mock-ups and presentations for Toyota, Tide and Benson & Hedges, among other accounts.