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.
About
Hi, I'm Ivan.
Head of UX/UI at Dreamix in Sofia. I end up building the things I design — and writing stories about Mars in between.
The story
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.
For more than ten years I've designed for others — freelance websites, travel software at Amadeus, client products at EPAM, healthcare at Patient21 — and today I lead the UX/UI team at Dreamix.
On my own time, 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.
Building
I take my designs all the way to production — Next.js, Supabase, Stripe, three.js and the Claude API are my everyday tools.
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.
- 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.
- 2025
Етика на празнотата
A novel about robots building a colony on Mars, written with AI and published chapter by chapter — 7 so far.
- 2022 — now
Head of UX/UI
Dreamix
Leading the design team: design thinking and design sprints, and helping every designer grow in the way that fits them best.
- 2021 — 22
Senior UX Designer → Team Lead UX/UI
Patient21
Healthcare built around the doctor–patient relationship. I created and maintained the design system and led the design-thinking process.
- 2020 — 21
Senior UX Designer
EPAM Systems
User experience for large client products.
- 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.
- 2017
Started writing here
Electric cars, new technology, renewables, photography and travels around Bulgaria.
- 2016 — 20
UX Designer
Amadeus (i:FAO Group)
UX, web and graphic design for travel software.
- 2013 — 16
Web Designer
Freelance
Websites from scratch — HTML, CSS and WordPress.
- 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