12+ years designing brand, product, and marketing work for tech and AI companies - solo design roles inside VentureBeat and Newo AI, plus fractional consulting for early-stage founders.
"Solo" is the operative word. At VentureBeat and Newo AI there was no creative director above me and no production layer below me: brand systems, product interfaces, marketing sites, event design, campaigns, and sales collateral were decided, produced, and shipped by one person. Client work with Yembo, Madhats, IDWA, Lavendo built the other muscle - walking into design systems I didn't create and finding exactly where they broke.
The way I work
Most design engagements start with a deliverable: someone decides they need a rebrand, a new site, a deck system, and hires hands to make it. I start earlier than that, because the deliverable is usually a guess about the problem, and often a wrong one.
That's the pattern in almost everything I'm hired for: a company's design has drifted - five vendors, three eras of branding, a website that doesn't match the product - and the fix everyone reaches for is a re-skin. I don't re-skin, because the surface was never where the inconsistency entered. I find where it did, fix it there, and then produce the work that follows from the diagnosis.
Before design
I launched a coliving business in San Francisco. That's not biography - it's the reason I read design decisions as business decisions. I've signed leases, run payroll, and watched what confused branding costs at the register. When I tell a founder a piece of design work isn't worth doing, that judgment comes from having paid for the wrong kind myself.
https://zcal.co/kholina