I stopped handing the design over.
I've been a designer since 2013. I started in visual design, then moved to interfaces. Most of that work has been on the complicated end: dashboards, admin tools, systems with real rules underneath. In 2026 I started building what I design instead of describing it to someone else, and I haven't gone back.
How I got here
I started in visual design. Infographics, advertising, brand work. The whole job was making a lot of information hold still and read in one look. That turned out to be the useful half of everything I've done since.
Then I moved to interfaces, and quickly to the difficult ones. Dashboards, internal tools, products with rules and states and edge cases, across a lot of different industries. Screens are the easy part. The hard part is the system underneath: what a thing can be, what happens when it is empty, what happens when someone does the wrong thing in the wrong order. I got good at that part, and I kept running into the same wall at the end of it. I would understand the system completely, draw it completely, and then hand it to someone else to build, and what came back was never quite it.
The day it changed
It was not a plan. When we moved to Belgrade we bought a domain for a small city guide, and to make anything of it I needed a developer. Instead I tried building it myself with AI, mostly to see what would happen.
The flows came out better. Not faster, better. The user journey I already had in my head went straight into the thing, in one pass, without a translation step where the reasoning gets lost. All the understanding I had been handing over in documents I was now spending directly on the build, and the build was more coherent for it. That was the moment. I have worked this way since, and the honest version of what I do now is: I design the system, set the architecture, the rules and the tests, and drive AI agents through the build. The code is written by agents. The decisions, the review and the answer for what ships are mine.
How I choose work
I don't keep a list of things I refuse. I'm most useful where there is a gap, and the gap takes a different shape every time: a product that does not exist yet, an interface that has outgrown its system, a design system that has to serve several brands, or a team that wants this way of working set up inside their own company. Those look like four services. They are really one thing done in four places: keeping the design and the build in the same pair of hands.
The real filter is the project and the people. I take a small number of engagements under my own name so that I can be in each of them properly. Work that needs a team or motion design goes to Align Scale. Marketing and growth work goes to Massivate.
Belgrade, and the rest
I am from İzmir. In January 2026 I moved to Belgrade with my partner in life, Tümay. A month later we founded two companies here together: I run Massivate, Tümay runs Align Scale.
Outside work I build games. Four cats supervise all of it.
If something here sounds like your problem, write to me: hello@buse.works