Designer, founder, maker.
I'm a designer and maker. Trained in fine arts, I founded my first startup in 2012 and have been designing products ever since. Studio Vincent is my consultancy, where I help founders and product teams find the version of the work that's worth committing to.
I co-founded Kaizen, a marathon training app, leading design from zero to one. Before that I led product design at Gastfreund in Berlin, where we built a "Slack for hotels" from scratch. I've worked across consumer and B2B, with two-person teams and forty-person ones.
Outside the product work, I paint, make artworks and prints, and try out new media. It's the same activity in a different medium. Both are about finding the version of the thing that's worth making.
What I bring that's different from a typical product designer is a fine arts training and twelve years across consumer and B2B product. The combination produces four habits that turn out to matter:
Sustained attention. I don't grasp for the first answer that fits the brief. The right answer often emerges only after the obvious answer has been rejected three or four times.
Working from nothing. If you've identified white space in your market worth going after, I can invent something that's never existed. Most designers can't do that. They reach for references.
Composition and atmosphere. Good design isn't only about hierarchy and grids. It draws on a vast visual language, and the atmosphere of a product is an emergent quality of many small decisions made consistently. I'm sensitive to both.
Connections across domains. I'm constantly drawing references from outside the immediate field. The interesting answers usually live somewhere outside it.
What these produce, working together, is the kind of creative direction that genuinely changes a product, not just combinational improvement that happens with incremental change or what an AI tool could now produce on its own.
Jan 2022 — April 2026
Marathon training app, grew from 0 to 30,000+ downloads with €0 marketing. I owned brand, product UX, design system, and creative direction across the full experience, from zero to one and through the company's first paying customers.
Apr 2019 — Jan 2022
Led product design across a seven-product B2B suite for the hotel industry. Took the platform from a single product to a multi-product suite serving thousands of hotels, working with a forty-person engineering and product team.
Apr 2018 — Mar 2019
Improved the data collection and engagement design across the learning platform used by tens of thousands of students across schools in the UK.
Jan 2018 — May 2018
Designed the mobile-first internal unit-analysis software used by Infarm staff to monitor produce health across the company's vertical farming installations.
I grew up in Devon, in the southwest of England — football most weekends, never quite learned to surf, and many a long ramble on Dartmoor. I studied fine arts at Bournemouth Arts University, where I learned to make many bad things before the good one arrives, and to sit with uncertainty longer than feels comfortable. Both have turned out to be useful in product work — more on that
I live in Berlin with my wife and our two small kids. I read a lot, paint and draw when I can, and write on Substack whenever there's time. I run to stay sane. Currently reading: Doctor Sleep by Stephen King.
The easiest way to get in touch is email — hello@studiovincent.co. I reply to most things within a couple of days. You can also find me on LinkedIn .
Most products read as competent and forgettable. The ones people remember were made by someone with the eye to see past the obvious, and the hand to do something about it.
Hand and Eye is the newsletter where I write about how to find it.
Apple’s unified design language (Liquid Glass) has been with us now for almost a year, receiving ongoing and mixed revi…
Reading Walter Benjamin in the age of generative design
What missing in most product teams that means the safe version always wins.
