Why Hire Damien Komala

Every designer's "why hire me" page reads the same. Passionate. Detail-oriented. Collaborative team player. Nothing on that list is checkable, which is exactly why none of it persuades anyone.

So here is the version with the receipts attached: what I have done, over how long, for whom, and what you would actually be getting on a Tuesday afternoon three weeks into a project — when the fun part is over and the work is deciding what happens to the empty state on a screen nobody remembered to spec. Everything below is on my résumé, and a good deal of it has finished work you can look at on the work page.

The short version

• 27+ years across product design, creative direction, front-end development and brand strategy.
• 300+ websites hand-coded in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP before I ever handed a design to someone else to build.
• Eleven roles spanning SaaS, fintech, real estate technology, e-commerce, hospitality, automotive, legal marketing and enterprise software.
• Two Summit Creative Awards (2013), and a BA in Art & Design from The Art Institute of Cincinnati.

Art school first, then a decade in the browser

I did not come to product design from a visual background and stop there. I came to it through the browser, and it took about ten years.

The formative stretch was Sesame Communications, where I built more than 300 dental practice websites in dynamic PHP inside eighteen months — remotely, from West Palm Beach, with a team in Seattle, in an era when "remote" mostly meant "unreachable." I was the technical lead for that team, which in practice meant being the person who got handed the CSS bug that four other people had already failed to reproduce. You learn a specific kind of humility from cross-browser debugging. You also learn how a layout actually behaves, rather than how the comp says it should.

Before that: art direction at Cole + Russell Architects, three e-commerce properties plus packaging and label design at Native Remedies, and high-end CSS, PHP and Ruby on Rails builds at THAT Agency, including global work for Sol Meliá and ME by Meliá Hotels. After it: 37 law firm websites at PMP Marketing Group, deployed through a Bootstrap templating system I built so that the thirty-eighth would cost a fraction of the first. That year, 2013, my work there took two Summit Creative Awards. I also ran the company's rebrand and mentored the junior designers, which is the part of that job I'd take again first.

Then e-commerce brand and front-end work at Ecom Automotive for TuffStuff4x4 and TrueFlame, where I also built the internal inventory and CRM systems, because the fulfillment bottleneck was not going to design its way out.

The last seven years: complex products, real stakes

At PropStream I was Creative Director and UI/UX Designer for nearly four years. I led the design and delivery of the company's first native iPhone application, from concept through App Store launch, with a consistent experience across iOS and Android. I designed and launched the framework for PropStream Academy, a customer education platform built to raise user proficiency and product adoption. I redesigned onboarding flows off A/B testing insight, and produced high-fidelity white-label prototypes that let the sales team demonstrate a customized product to global enterprise partners before a line of it existed. I also contributed to a 60% increase in company growth through the paid acquisition program, working alongside the agency Lagentia on keyword and KEI research, competitor analysis, ad creation and bidding strategy.

At PropertyReach I was Senior UI/UX Designer and Creative Director for a real estate SaaS platform, running the full design lifecycle — research and journey mapping through high-fidelity prototyping and delivery — and building the unified Figma design system that cut handoff time and stopped the interface drifting apart one feature at a time.

At Platinum Digital I led UX strategy and interface design for a blockchain-secured loan application with three distinct personas: buyers, vendors and loan officers. That is the interesting constraint. A buyer needs the transaction to feel simple and safe; a loan officer needs density, state and audit trail. Both live inside one design system, and the system is what keeps the second one from making the first one worse.

Since February 2026 I have been a UI/UX Design Expert with Mercor / Micro1, translating UX practice into structured, data-driven guidelines that AI models can actually apply — and building the evaluation loops that check whether the resulting design decisions hold up.

What I'm good at: designing things that get built

Most designers think visually or think technically. The useful part of my background is that I do both, and the practical consequence is friction that never happens.

Having hand-coded 300+ sites, I design knowing what is buildable, what is expensive, and what looks trivial in Figma and costs an engineer two days. That kills a whole category of revision cycle — the one where a beautiful comp comes back from the sprint half-implemented because it assumed a behavior the framework doesn't have. My deliverables are handoff-ready: states specified, breakpoints resolved, components named the way the codebase will name them. Engineers should be able to start, not to schedule a meeting to find out what I meant.

It also means I can build. This site is a Next.js application I designed and shipped myself, test-first, with an end-to-end suite that runs on desktop Chromium, WebKit and two mobile viewports before anything deploys.

Attention to detail is a process, not a personality trait

Anyone can claim to be detail-oriented. What that claim should mean is that the details are caught by something other than the designer's mood on the day.

A concrete example from this site. The amber I use for accents is a brand color, not an accessible one — on the light theme it measures about 1.87:1 against the page, nowhere near the 4.5:1 that body copy requires. Rather than quietly compromise the brand into an ochre nobody chose, the rule is that nothing load-bearing is ever set in it: headings, body text and every interactive affordance sit on tokens that clear the standard, and the amber is reserved for eyebrows and labels whose meaning is carried by the text beside them. The focus ring is a separate token again, deepened until it clears its own 3:1 threshold.

That is one decision out of hundreds, and the point is not the decision. The point is that it is written down, tokenized in one file, and verified by a test that measures the brightest pixel actually rendered under the text — because a contrast ratio that gets eyeballed once is a contrast ratio that regresses in six weeks. Design systems, naming conventions, accessibility floors and documented rationale are how detail survives contact with a roadmap. Left as a personal virtue, it survives until the first tight deadline.

Work ethic, from the other side of the ticket

The résumé line is "300+ websites in eighteen months." What that actually was: a fixed weekly commitment, met remotely, for a team three time zones away who could not see whether I was working. That is the whole of my case on work ethic — I have been doing distributed, deadline-bound delivery since long before it was the default, and the record is unbroken.

The second half is scope. At PropertyReach, the platform needed a paid acquisition and analytics program and there wasn't one, so I stood it up from scratch: Google Analytics configuration and reporting, keyword and KEI research in SEMrush, competitor analysis, ad creative, metadata, and a bidding strategy built toward long-term goals rather than this month's number — all of it inside a genuinely limited runway. At PropStream I wrote, directed and appeared in the YouTube campaigns, because the brand needed a face and hiring one wasn't in the budget.

Neither of those was in a job description. Both needed doing. If you are hiring a designer who will tell you that analytics isn't their department, that is a real preference and you should hire for it deliberately. It is not what you get with me.

Current, not nostalgic

Twenty-seven years is only an asset if it compounds, and the fastest way to turn experience into a liability is to treat the last two years as somebody else's problem.

So I work in the new tooling directly, not adjacent to it. Claude Code for agentic development, Model Context Protocol for connecting a model to real systems, context engineering and test-driven prompting, AI-assisted Git-to-Vercel deployment. The assistant in the corner of this page is a Python service I built: it answers from this site's published content, and its guardrails will refuse to state a price the site doesn't publish — including a correct price wrapped in a hedge, because "around $2,250" is a different claim from $2,250. That is the same instinct as the contrast rule. Make the system incapable of the mistake rather than trusting everyone to remember.

The judgment that decides what to build, which trade-off to take, and when a flow is quietly wrong is the part that took the 27 years. The tools just made it faster to act on.

Where I'm not the right hire

I am strongest where design meets build: product interfaces, design systems, complex multi-role SaaS, and marketing surfaces that have to convert rather than merely look expensive. If what you need is a pure visual campaign with no product surface behind it, or a specialist in a discipline I'd be learning on your budget, there is someone better for that and I'd rather say so now than three weeks in.

If that sounds like the fit

I'm based in Orange County, California, and I work remotely with distributed teams as a matter of routine. I'm open to senior and lead product design roles — Sr Lead UX Designer, Senior Product Designer, Sr Principal Designer, Senior Director of Design — as well as project engagements.

The case studies show the work in detail, the résumé has the full chronology, and the contact form reaches me directly. Tell me what you're building and what's currently in the way of it, and I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the person for it.