About

Hi, I'm Ivan.

A UX designer from Sofia who ends up building the things he designs — and writing stories about Mars in between.

Portrait of Ivan Vasilev

After four years in Germany I came back to Bulgaria knowing I had to change direction. I swapped pure informatics for computer science and multimedia at New Bulgarian University, and design became the thing I couldn't stop doing — first visual identities and websites, then user experience.

I look for the beautiful and the different in everything around me. My taste runs from cave paintings through Dalí, Picasso and Warhol to Sebastião Salgado, and what I want from design is what I want from art: that people feel something.

These days the line between designing and building has disappeared for me. I take an idea from a sketch to a live product people can use — a strategy game, a free UX bootcamp, a map of Sofia's city problems, a gifting app. And when I'm not shipping, I'm writing a novel about robots on Mars.

In my free time I take photographs. It helps me unwind, and some of them end up in my designs.

01

Product & UX design

Research, information architecture, flows and prototypes. I start from the people who will use the thing, and I keep testing with them.

02

Building

I take my designs all the way to production — Next.js, Supabase, Stripe, three.js and the Claude API are my everyday tools.

03

Writing & video

Essays on technology and the future, a novel set on Mars, and short devlogs on YouTube about how my game gets made.

So far

A short timeline.

  1. 2026

    Shipping my own products

    8 products designed and built end to end — 5 of them live, from a strategy game to a civic map of Sofia.

  2. 2025

    Етика на празнотата

    A novel about robots building a colony on Mars, written with AI and published chapter by chapter — 7 so far.

  3. 2019 — 20

    The design-thinking process, documented

    Surveys, benchmarks, affinity diagrams, journey maps, flows, sketches and Figma prototypes — every step written up as a case study.

  4. 2017

    Started writing here

    Electric cars, new technology, renewables, photography and travels around Bulgaria.

  5. Before

    Germany, then back home

    Four years in Germany, then back to Bulgaria to change direction — from pure informatics to computer science and multimedia at New Bulgarian University.

Say hello

ivan.h.vasilev@gmail.com