Portrait of the designer

About

I design digital products and lead visual direction with a focus on quality, clarity, and systems thinking. My work sits at the intersection of art direction, product design, and implementation, where aesthetics, structure, and behaviour are treated as one continuous system.


Over the years, I’ve developed my own AI-augmented design pipelines that extend my practice rather than define it. They allow me to explore more deeply, iterate with higher fidelity, and maintain a strong level of craft across every stage of the process.

My toolkit

Figma
Framer
Sketch
Xcode
SwiftUI
Cursor
Codex
Warp
DeepSeek
Grok

Experience

2024 — Now

Design Engineering

AI-native product design and engineering for complex interfaces, systems, prototypes, and production UI. At Unipaws and Kalkaev®, work with Web3 and crypto infrastructure teams on investing and trading interfaces, dashboards, DEX and CEX using React/Next.js, Swift, Codex, LLM APIs and AI chat UIs.

Apple Design Award 2024

Contra Top 1% Creative 2025

2020 — 2024

Product Design

End-to-end product design for fintech, crypto, iGaming, Web3, and SaaS. At Lunapark, Pixpowder, and Unipaws, designed trading dashboards, onboarding, account systems, internal tools, component libraries, design systems, and complex flows from discovery to release.

2016 — 2020

Design Leadership

Creative direction and multidisciplinary team leadership at Lunapark. Led web, product, identity, and campaign work for Yandex, VK, Wargaming, Severgazbank, EKSMO, and others, owning concepts, reviews, client communication, and design quality.

2011 — 2016

Graphic Design & Web

Graphic design, identities, campaigns, and web with focus on typography, grids, composition, and art direction. Created websites and digital experiences for Suzuki, VK, Haval, Efes, and Sony, progressing from designer to art director.

Readings

Attention Is All You Need
Human Integration Design Processes
Adventure Time: The Original Cartoon Title Cards, Vol. 1
Letters of Note
Modern Computer Architecture and Organization
Madvillain’s Madvillainy
The Eye of the World
AppleDesign

Writings

AI-agents are the new type of users

AI agents now read pages, click controls and fill forms on people's behalf. What product design has to add beyond the pixels so both humans and agents can use it.

The button was too easy

A crypto trading product had healthy engagement, but users stopped when serious money entered the flow.

Fast image feeds are a scheduling problem

Image-heavy feeds feel fast when the browser does the right work in the right order. A practical guide to image sizing, loading, caching, and scroll UX.

Designing a crypto onboarding flow

Behind the UX architecture of BlastUP's IDO flow: onboarding, wallet connection, staking, and the structural decisions that reduced drop-off by 40%.

About cognitive load

Bright interfaces aren't necessarily confusing. The real cognitive load starts when people have to guess what happens next.

BlueA small blue point of view
Start anywhere
Ask about Ivan…
© 2026 Ivan Kalkaev

Privacy

© 2026 Ivan Kalkaev

Privacy