Hello! I'm Jan, a multifaceted designer from the Philippines passionately inclined to product design with an entrepreneurial, growth mindset.
I'm an autodidact dropout who excels on pragmatic execution. I enjoy sketching, doodling, hand lettering, playing games, napping, watch weird and interesting movies, reading, listening to podcasts or just hanging out with my failures to learn from them.
Experience and skillset
For the past 3 years (since September 2020), I successfully scaled and continually manage the product design team of PayMongo. As for my IC designer experience I've been designing since 2008 (15+ years), with around 10+ years experience for web and mobile, and product design experience since 2014.
Two of my biggest milestones as an IC designer is that I built a design system from ground including the front-end development that helped me collaborate with 14 engineers working as the sole designer for a while in First Circle and designing/developing a fully functional touchscreen kiosk for the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Museum.
I've been involved both in an agency who worked with different clients and projects so some people might classify me as a jack-of-all-trades but I believe I'm a pragmatic designer with a few more skills and mindsets that go hand-in-hand with it.
To save resource as much as possible and lessen guess work, it is a necessity to do some foundational research to help validate the need or identify the problem as early as possible, making it easier for everyone to make sound decisions.
— Solution Ideation
This is where the most fun part of my design process is. As we can go crazy and let the creative juices flow with minimal or zero restraints.
— Design Sprint / Workshop
— UX Planning
This is where we usually plan how to implement the best solution from the ideation stage, already considering UI and creating UX flows for proper fit, going for function over form.
— Rough Sketching & Wireframing
— Low-fidelity Prototyping
— Information Architecture
— Customer Journey Mapping
Design Execution
— Visual Design
Using a solid background and experience in graphic and UI design, this is where attention to details comes in to add appeal
— Branding / Visual Identity
— Design Systems
— Typography
— Layout / Visual Hierarchy
— Color Theory
— Motion Graphics
— Front-end Development
After creating wireframes / mock-ups, I will then proceed to coding and implement the UI. Sometimes, I skipped doing mock-ups on Photoshop and go straigth from wireframe to coding.
— Semantic HTML Coding
— CSS / Stylus
— A bit of javascript
— Adaptive / Responsive Design
— Iteration
Refining details, removing unnecessary features or elements. Sometimes going back to the drawing board. That kind of stuff.
Other Surprises (I really hope so)
— Back-end Oriented
Basically, this just mean that I know a few things about the capabilities and limitations of what back-end can do. This helps me a lot in terms of implementing feasible user experiences.
I believe and have proven that understanding how backend work wonders will expand your imagination when working with an engineering team.
— Entrepreneurial Mindset
I love generating ideas! Most of the time to solve a certain problem or address a certain need.
To be honest, this is probably one of the reasons I wanted to learn as much as I can, practicing pragmatic autodidacticism so that I can easily implement my ideas and test it myself without too much delay.
Also, by having this kind of mindset, I usually assess if something is really worth doing.
Portfolio
As a honest proof of my capabilities, I curated some of the works that I've done from 2017 and below.
Note: Due to NDAs, I may not be able to show some of my more recent project as it is mostly internal tools for PayMongo and First Circle.
Web Design, Front-end Development and UI/UX Projects
Homepage Design Study
Partial UI: Navigation Drop-down
JiffyQuery
Product Design Idea
Homepage Design Study
Partial UI: Anatomy of a JiffyQuery post
Partial UI: Post Question Form
Partial UI: Notification
Partial UI: Sign-up / Login Form
Smaller Projects
A collection of sites that I was able to work on.
PortfolioMNL
HomepagePartial UI: Slide-out Login/Sign-up Panel
oShopr
Homepage Design StudyRegistration Form
Lightserve
HomepageSubpage: Benefits and FeaturesSubpage: Sign-up Form