Hi. I’m Pavel, a senior product designer. My work moves between product, identity, editorial design, and personal research. Rather than separate those areas into case studies, I’ve arranged it as a long read, tracing one body of work as it takes different forms over time.
Designing with moving parts
Recent work
From demo to launch in four weeks
Government Self-Certification in Argyle Link.
Launch
From internal demo to public launch in four weeks.
Scope
13 flows and edge-case scenarios across three iterations.
My role
Product UX, prototyping, visual design, and engineering handoff.
Government Self-Certification began before design joined the project. To conserve time and capacity, Argyle’s vp of Product Strategy had created an early prototype for an internal demo. It established the broad logic and gave the team something concrete to challenge without pretending to be the final experience.
The product was part of Argyle’s move into government verification. It allowed applicants for programs such as Medicaid, snap, and tanf to review connected income and employment data, choose what to include, and submit it for verification. Design and engineering resources were limited, while the go-to-market team was working towards a public launch four weeks later.
As requirements emerged, I rebuilt the prototype from scratch and used ai to iterate through the product logic, flows, edge cases, and copy. Across three iterations, the work expanded into 13 flows and edge-case scenarios. By the second week, I had translated them into detailed static wireframes through an ai-assisted workflow. These supported stakeholder review and three rounds of legal review while engineering began building the underlying logic and preparing the front end—without waiting for a final design handoff.
One of those scenarios became especially consequential. A connected gig-employer account could take up to ten minutes to return all its data. Should applicants have to wait for every source before submitting? We aligned on a flow that allowed them to proceed while clearly showing what was ready, what remained unavailable, and what would happen next.
The launch also overlapped with a transition between two generations of Argyle Link. The product had to ship in Link 5, the existing system, while Link 6 was being developed with improved accessibility. I resolved the flow in both systems so the product could launch in the current one without recreating the work for the migration that followed.
In the final week, I completed the visual design and built a front-end prototype documenting loading behaviour, transitions, and micro-animations for engineering. Four weeks after the initial demo, Government Self-Certification launched publicly and was in use with its first clients. gtm could enter prospect conversations with a working product rather than a future proposition.
ai did not replace the decisions made during those four weeks. It reduced the time between different forms of the work, allowing design, legal, and engineering to move together rather than wait for a finished handoff.
At Argyle
One practice, many surfaces
Income, employment, and banking verification platform.
Current scale
$110M+ raised
4M+ annual verifications
150+ lenders on platform
Design terrain
Product work across legal, technical, partner, and implementation constraints.
My role
Senior IC across product UX, systems, brand/web, and AI-assisted exploration.
Government Self-Certification is one recent part of my six years at Argyle. I started with Console, a client-facing product, then added internal admin tools and the Encompass integration. Later, I took on Argyle Link, the consumer-facing product. Each new area adds to the work rather than replacing what came before. Alongside that, I contribute to brand work, including the latest facelift that helped lay the foundation for a new direction.
Work over time
Console
Console is the operational surface customers use to manage their teams and organization settings, create api keys, configure consumer flows, initiate connections, and investigate verification results. I have owned design for Console since its earliest days, shaping it as the platform expands beyond payroll data.
Internal tools
Internal tools support Argyle’s operational teams through analytics, feature flags, and client management. The work is less visible than customer-facing product, but it needs the same clarity because it shapes how quickly the company can operate, investigate issues, and respond to clients.
Argyle Link
Argyle Link is the consumer-facing side of the product, where people connect payroll and bank accounts to complete verification. The work is about making a complex process understandable enough for someone who has not asked to learn the system behind it.
What connects this work is the verification system itself. I work across the surfaces that make it operate: the tools customers use to configure it, the experiences consumers move through, and the communication that helps people understand it. The scope changes, but the underlying design question remains the same: how do we make a complex, consequential process clear enough for people to act with confidence?
Encompass
Encompass brings Argyle’s verification products into an existing mortgage workflow. I designed an initial version quickly to test the integration’s value for lenders and for Argyle. Once the fit was clear, I led the Encompass 2.0 redesign. During the Encompass 3.0 redesign, I expanded the work into a broader vision that added banking and asset verification alongside income and employment verification, creating the foundation for Argyle’s 3-in-1 Verification.
Invites
Invites support the consumer journey across the verticals Argyle operates in. The journey often begins with an email or landing page, where the first task is to explain the request clearly enough for someone to understand why they are being asked to connect an account, what to do next, and what will happen with their information.
GTM design
My work with web pages, launch materials, and customer-facing communication is on and off rather than continuous. My contribution is primarily directional and conceptual: helping teams turn product detail into clearer structures, narratives, and language that support adoption beyond the interface itself.
The next chapter steps back from that six-year span to a shorter engagement before my full-time work at Argyle.
Before Argyle
A company taking shape
Space solar technology company for orbital infrastructure.
Current scale
$40M raised
1 MW/year manufacturing capacity
Products flying on 7 spacecraft
Design terrain
Brand, web, deck, and key visuals for a technical company preparing for fundraising.
My role
Brand identity, website design/build, deck system, and CGI art direction.
Solestial came to me for new branding, a website, and presentation decks ahead of fundraising. We had roughly two months, so the identity process had to be concentrated.
We kept the identity deliberately minimal. The core was a typographic wordmark, using a distinctive typeface with small custom modifications. I did not want another space-tech symbol built around orbit, stars, propulsion, or an abstract version of the future. Solestial needed something restrained, technical, and direct: simple enough to reproduce, strong enough to hold across a website, deck, lab materials, uniforms, or eventually somewhere much further from Earth.
From there, I designed the core identity system: typography, a minimal colour palette, a pitch deck template, and the first website.
The website connected the physical technology with the future it was meant to enable. The front page carried the bigger picture: the visual world, the ambition, and where the technology could live. The inner pages moved closer to the product itself, explaining the panels, their features, and what made the technology different. The founders supplied the copy and technical language; I organised it into the website’s structure.
After the first investment round closed, I helped with smaller branded materials and packaged the system so the team could continue developing it independently. By then, I was moving into full-time work at Argyle and could not stay as involved.
The website was later redesigned as the company grew; my contribution was the earlier system used during fundraising, not the current site. That engagement came at the end of an earlier period of work. The next chapter returns to the editorial projects of 2016–2020 that preceded it.
Editorial work
From experiments to practice
No-code browser tool for designing and publishing websites.
Output
Editorial projects, talks, and workshops
Design terrain
Editorial web, long reads, typography, templates, and non-conventional web publishing.
My role
Independent designer across long reads, templates, talks, and workshops.
Before product became the main surface of my work, I spent several years inside editorial experiments. Roughly from 2016 to 2020, across consulting, agency projects, and commercial commissions, I learned how layout, typography, and sequence could give a subject form on screen.
A big part of that period was Readymag. It was the first wysiwyg web editor I tried that felt genuinely open. At the time, designers were often told they had to learn to code. I understood the logic, but it never felt like my path. I cared more about how a story took form: layout, rhythm, sequence, and how it unfolded on screen.
The first playground was a series of long reads about the Moon. The real subject was format: one issue could feel cinematic, another typographic, another closer to an archive or an experimental scroll-based story. I wanted each piece to find its own structure. Readymag made the browser feel less like a constraint and more like a page with depth, motion, and time.
Those experiments led to a relationship with Readymag itself. One of the co-founders noticed the project and reached out. At first, it was feedback on the tool and conversations about how I was pushing it. Then it became a collaboration.
Readymag invited me to design an issue of Enso, its magazine about design, art, history, and the space between them. This was different from solo experimentation. There was an editor, a photo editor, an established creative direction, and a higher production standard.
After Enso, the collaboration continued through more publications, commercial long reads, and templates for Readymag. Template work introduced a different constraint: the design had to hold up with someone else’s content, without me controlling every detail.
Readymag gave the work a public context. I spoke at conferences on behalf of Readymag and hosted workshops on web publishing. Around 2019, I called that thinking the “other web”: form shaped by the subject, rather than websites becoming strange for their own sake.
Those years formed the editorial instincts I later carried into product and systems work. The next projects used those instincts without a client brief, exploring subjects rooted in memory, place, and personal curiosity.
Personal research
Work without a brief
leta.today
leta.today began with an interest in Soviet modernist architecture in Belarus. It was not a distant subject. These were buildings I could see, visit, and remember as part of Minsk, the city where I grew up.
I turned that interest into a publication. I went to a photo archive in Minsk without knowing what I would find, and the first subject came directly from that search. From there, I licensed and retouched archival photographs, worked with Dmitry Zadorin as the main author, commissioned present-day photography from Alexey Cherenkevich, and brought in editorial support. I then brought those parts together into a coherent publication, carrying it from the initial idea through design and release.
Two issues were published: one about a single building, another about mass housing. The project stopped after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Continuing a Russian-language project no longer felt morally possible.
Synthetic memory
The ai experiments also began with a city, memory, architecture, and nostalgia. I wanted to know whether a synthetic visual layer could sustain atmosphere, consistency, and emotional truth.
In early 2024, I used Midjourney to test image generation as editorial material. The technology was still unstable: details broke, images drifted, and consistency was difficult to maintain. The work was finding a visual language that could hold despite that.
It was both a technical study of a fast-moving tool and an attempt to give form to a city held mostly in memory.
One year later
By 2025, the tools had changed: there was more control, sharper detail, and a broader range across different models.
This time, the project became more typographic. I limited myself to one type foundry through Fontstand, using its catalogue to build a broad typographic palette. The goal was not to make typography loud, but to create tone, variety, and rhythm.
The text mixed personal memory with abstract llm fragments that were sometimes naive or too literal. I was testing whether images, words, typography, and synthetic atmosphere could hold together.
None of these projects began with a client brief. Each began with a personal interest or emotion and became material through research and design.
Looking back
The work looks different up close
When I started putting this portfolio together, it wasn’t my first attempt. Every time I tried before, the same doubts came up: the work felt inconsistent, some projects seemed insignificant, and I wasn’t always sure there was much worth highlighting.
Looking through the archive reminded me why I made those decisions and what it took to finish the work. The projects felt more substantial than they had in my memory.
Not every project went smoothly. There were disagreements, changing circumstances, other people’s egos, and my own, but I kept showing up and learned how to adjust without losing sight of the work. For me, that meant staying visible and transparent with clients and coworkers, helping the situation move forward, and making sure we delivered what we had promised.
Looking back hasn’t made me suddenly satisfied with everything, and the doubt hasn’t disappeared. It has made me appreciate how much ground I’ve covered, while reminding me that I’m still curious about what I don’t know and excited by where design and technology are going.
I’ve done a lot—and I’m just getting started.