Portfolio - 2024 / Berlin

Designing tools that
respect your attention.

UX designer working at the intersection of productivity software and cultural history. I build interfaces that stay out of the way, then earn their place through quiet, useful detail.

Currently
Senior UX Designer, Lateral Studio
Focus
Productivity tools, cultural archives
Available
Select projects, Q2 2025
Scroll
01 About

A practice built on restraint and good defaults.

Eight years of designing software that people use every day, often without noticing. That is the goal.

Emma Kowalski, Studio portrait Berlin, 2024
Studio, Berlin

I came to design through archives. While cataloguing 19th-century letters for a university library, I kept thinking about how the interface shaped what researchers could find, and what they missed. That tension, between rich material and the thin window we give people to read it, still drives every project I take on.

Today I work mostly on productivity tools and cultural history platforms. The two share more than you'd expect. Both ask: how do you hold a lot of information without overwhelming the person sitting in front of it?

My process is plain. I sketch in Figma, prototype in code, and test with real people early. I care about typography, about footnotes that expand instead of disappearing, about timers that chime softly rather than buzz. The small things compound.

8
Years designing for product teams and cultural institutions
30+
Shipped products, from research tools to public archives
4
Awards for accessibility and information design
02 Selected work

Four projects, each one a question about attention.

A small sample. Each piece below started with a specific problem and ended with a tool people use daily.

17:42 FOCUS Cadence Pomodoro timer
Productivity / 2024
Cadence
A focus timer with alternating work and rest cycles, a circular dial, and soft chimes. Built for people who want structure without a buzzing phone.
2024
1 1. SOURCE View original → Marginalia Reading interface
Cultural / 2023
Marginalia
A long-form reading interface where inline citations expand to show source details and link back to the original archive.
2023
2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 Atlas Data explorer
Data / 2023
Atlas
An interactive explorer for a cultural-history archive, letting researchers filter 12,000 records by decade, region, and medium.
2023
Entry 042 14 March 2024 field archive Field Notes
Tool / 2022
Field Notes
A note-taking app for researchers doing archival fieldwork, with offline sync, tagging, and a reading mode designed for long sessions.
2022

Four steps, repeated until the thing disappears.

Good tools fade into use. The process below is how I get there, usually with a team and always with real people in the loop.

01
Listen
Interviews, shadowing, and reading whatever the client has already written. The problem is usually half-solved in the language people use to describe it.
02
Sketch
Low-fidelity layouts in Figma, then quick HTML prototypes. I test structure before surface, because a beautiful screen that hides the main task helps no one.
03
Refine
Typography, spacing, motion. This is where the MAIK discipline comes in: one accent, square corners, hairlines, and a lot of white space doing structural work.
04
Ship
Handoff in code, not just Figma. I write the front-end myself when I can, so the detail survives the jump from file to browser.
04 Contact