Why Hire Damien Komala

Every designer's "why hire me" page reads the same. Passionate. Detail-oriented. Collaborative team player. I've probably written that sentence myself at some point, and I'm sorry. None of it can be checked, which is exactly why none of it convinces anybody.

So this is the version with receipts: what I've done, for how long, for whom, and what you'd actually get on a Tuesday afternoon three weeks into a project. That's when the fun kickoff energy has worn off and the real work is deciding what happens on an empty state nobody remembered to design. Everything below is on my résumé, and plenty of it has finished work you can look at on the work page.

The short version

• End to end: 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.
• Roles spanning SaaS, fintech, real estate technology, e-commerce, hospitality, automotive, legal marketing and enterprise software.
• Two Summit Creative Awards and a BA in Art & Design from The Art Institute of Cincinnati.

Art school first, then a decade in the browser

I didn't come to product design from the visual side and stop there. I came to it through the browser, and that took about ten years.

The years that shaped me most were at Sesame Communications, where I built more than 300 dental practice websites in dynamic PHP in eighteen months. I did it remotely from West Palm Beach, with a team in Seattle, back when "remote" mostly meant "unreachable." I was the technical lead, which in practice meant I got the CSS bug that four other people had already failed to reproduce. Cross-browser debugging teaches you a very particular kind of humility. It also teaches you how a layout really behaves, as opposed to how the mockup promised it would.

Before that came art direction at Cole + Russell Architects, three e-commerce sites 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, I built 37 law firm websites at PMP Marketing Group and deployed them through a Bootstrap templating system I made so the thirty-eighth would cost a fraction of the first. (Building the same site 37 times by hand is a great way to become very interested in templates.) My work there won two Summit Creative Awards. I also led the company's rebrand and mentored the junior designers, and that's the part of the job I'd sign up for again first.

Then I did e-commerce brand and front-end work at Ecom Automotive for TuffStuff4x4 and TrueFlame. I also built their internal inventory and CRM systems, because the fulfillment bottleneck wasn't going to fix itself with a nicer button.

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 app, 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 get users more confident with the product and using more of it. I redesigned onboarding flows based on A/B test results, and built high-fidelity white-label prototypes so the sales team could show global enterprise partners a customized product before a line of it had been written. I also contributed to a 60% increase in company growth through the paid acquisition program, working with 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. I ran the whole design lifecycle, from research and journey mapping through high-fidelity prototypes and delivery, and built a unified Figma design system that cut handoff time and kept the interface from 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 very different users: buyers, vendors and loan officers. That's the fun constraint. A buyer wants the transaction to feel simple and safe. A loan officer wants density, status and an audit trail. Both live in one design system, and the system is what stops the loan officer's needs from making the buyer's experience worse.

Since February 2026 I've been a UI/UX Design Expert with Mercor / Micro1, turning UX practice into structured, data-driven guidelines that AI models can actually follow, 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 lean visual or lean technical. The useful thing about my background is that I do both, and the practical result is a lot of friction that simply never shows up.

Because I've hand-coded 300+ sites, I design knowing what's buildable, what's expensive, and what looks like nothing in Figma but costs an engineer two days. That wipes out a whole kind of revision cycle, the one where a gorgeous mockup comes back from the sprint half-built because it assumed the framework could do something it can't. My handoffs come with the states specified, the breakpoints worked out, and components named the way the codebase will name them. Engineers should be able to start building, not book a meeting to figure out what I meant.

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

Attention to detail is a process, not a personality trait

Anyone can say they're detail-oriented. What it ought to mean is that the details get caught by something more reliable than how the designer happens to feel that day.

Here's a real 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 text needs. I didn't want to quietly water the brand down into some ochre nobody picked, so the rule is that nothing important is ever set in it. Headings, body text and every interactive element use colors that clear the standard, and the amber is saved for small labels whose meaning is carried by the text right next to them. The focus ring gets its own color again, deepened until it clears its own 3:1 threshold.

That's one decision out of hundreds, and the decision itself isn't really the point. The point is that it's written down, stored in one file, and checked by a test that measures the brightest pixel actually rendered under the text. A contrast ratio someone eyeballed once tends to quietly slip within six weeks. Design systems, naming conventions, accessibility minimums and written-down reasoning are how details survive a busy roadmap. If detail is just a personal virtue, it lasts until the first tight deadline.

Work ethic, from the other side of the ticket

On the résumé it says "300+ websites in eighteen months." What that really meant was a fixed weekly commitment, delivered remotely, for a team three time zones away who couldn't see whether I was working or watching TV. I was working. I've been doing distributed, deadline-driven delivery since long before everyone's kitchen table became an office, and I haven't broken that record.

The other half is scope. At PropertyReach the platform needed a paid acquisition and analytics program and didn't have one, so I built it from scratch: Google Analytics setup and reporting, keyword and KEI research in SEMrush, competitor analysis, ad creative, metadata, and a bidding strategy aimed at long-term goals instead of this month's number, all on a genuinely tight 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. So yes, the guy in the videos was also the guy who designed the app.

Neither of those was in my job description. Both needed doing. If you want a designer who'll tell you analytics isn't their department, that's a fair preference and you should hire for it on purpose. You just won't get that from me.

Current, not nostalgic

Experience only counts if it keeps building on itself. The quickest way to turn experience into baggage is to decide the last two years are someone else's problem.

So I use the new tools directly instead of reading about them. Claude Code for agentic development, Model Context Protocol for connecting a model to real systems, context engineering and test-driven prompting, and 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 won't state a price the site doesn't publish. That includes a correct price wrapped in a hedge, because "around $2,250" is a different promise from $2,250. It's the same instinct as the contrast rule: make the system unable to make the mistake, instead of trusting everyone to remember.

Deciding what to build, which trade-off to take, and when a flow is quietly wrong is the part that took years of shipping. The tools just let me act on it faster.

Where I'm not the right hire

I'm strongest where design meets build: product interfaces, design systems, complex SaaS with lots of user roles, and marketing pages that need to convert, not just look expensive. If you need a pure visual campaign with no product behind it, or a specialist in a field I'd be learning on your dime, there's someone better for that. I'd much rather tell you now than three weeks in.

If that sounds like a fit

I'm based in Orange County, California, and working remotely with distributed teams is just normal for me. 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 work.

The case studies show the work in detail, the résumé has the full timeline, and the contact form comes straight to me. Tell me what you're building and what's getting in the way, and I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right person for it.