I’m a technical product designer, currently at Tonic.ai.
I enjoy learning how complex systems work
In learning a system, you come to understand what guided its designers. Hopefully, you also find ways to explain that logic to others. The hardest part of interface design is knowing when to show the underlying system vs. simplifying the system’s complexity so that it doesn’t get in the way.
I got my start in print. Bless the engineer at Adobe who put Javascript and GREP into InDesign—once I realized the potential, it was turtles all the way down.
I’ve spent the last decade diving into Unix-like systems and web technologies. I try to take the concepts I learn from these explorations—ideas like accessibility, affordance, composability, modality, simplicity—and apply them to my work.
I want to design systems that improve the human
condition.
Because life is too short for crappy
software.
My design process
I generally move through five phases on a design project. Although their implementation is never really the same, I’d describe them as:
- Research the problem, the client’s domain, the user’s needs, the limitations.
- Analyze how to solve for x.
- Design a prototype to solve the problem.
- Test the prototype to figure out where the model succeeded and where it fails.
- Rinse and repeat—tweak the design until it produces the desired outcome.
Experience
I’ve designed software for:
I sometimes moonlight as an illustrator. In a parallel life I’m a woodworker. Feel free to reach out at xavier@valarino.com.
Colophon
About the site:
The display font is Uxum Grotesque by Bureau Nuits.
The body font is Inter by Rasmus Andersson.
The site is hand-written in Markdown, HTML, and CSS. It’s built with a Bash script that orchestrates Pandoc and NodeJS. The source code is hosted on Github.