I translate complicated into human

I sold my first website in 2005, to a construction company, paid in cash and a bathroom refit. It ran without a single change until 2019. Fourteen years, longer than most design trends live. That is when I decided to make things that outlast fashion.

After that the complexity only grew. A German maker of heating equipment, packaging and industrial design (I saw that packaging again in 2023, still the same). One of the most visited online hypermarkets in the Russian web, where I was the only designer and learned to count design in money through A/B tests. The studio Blackwood took me from senior designer to art director, with projects for Coca-Cola, ExxonMobil, Salesforce and Kodak. After that came design teams under NDA, mostly for banks and investment firms. Seven years at ATON, one of Russia’s largest independent investment houses: the design system, ATON Space, ATON Line, and the research the team used to redraw the client path. VTB CIB was a team of designers and researchers inside Russia’s second-largest bank. Now I work with Raiffeisen, the bank and its asset management company, in parallel.

The word “now” matters here. Over these years AI moved from a curiosity into part of my working process: reading context, checking scenarios for missing states, UX copy, documentation. The decisions are a different matter. I make the final call.

My school is a studio school. At Blackwood dozens of projects ran through my hands in parallel, from packaging to campaigns for Coca-Cola and Salesforce. That is where I learned the one art director skill that matters, seeing where a layout breaks before the client sees it. I brought that school into fintech. At ATON and VTB I built and ran teams of designers and researchers: hiring, onboarding, reviews, the design process.

A review at my table has nothing to do with taste. The decision gets taken apart against the data and against the system it lives in. Mentoring is there so that in six months the person closes on their own what they brought me yesterday. I hire slowly and let people go free fast. The best measure of my work is the month the team stops asking me things.

The home page of this site carries the Papanek quote about design as the “conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order.” I check against it more often than against the weather forecast. In practice it means this: simplicity is the organization of complexity. A good interface does not pretend that derivatives are easy. It lays the hard part out in the order a person thinks in.

The second belief: I do not choose between beauty and data. A decision has to be justified and it has to be beautiful. Design lives exactly at the point where science and art balance each other.