About Ivo Zhelev
Multidisciplinary designer from Stara Zagora, Bulgaria. Ten years of bringing logic to design decisions — design systems, products for a global enterprise, and one board game that refuses to stay a side project.
The short version
I am a product designer. Most of my working life has gone into systems — the components, the palettes and the rules underneath an interface — and nearly all of it for products where being wrong is expensive: banks, a crypto platform used by millions, and now an enterprise product larger than any of them.
I work at Voidweb, out of Stara Zagora. What is written here is the reasoning rather than the screens — the decisions, the constraints they were made under, and what each one turned out to teach me.
How I work
Design is not a department, it is a position in a discussion. Engineers, PMs and QA all see failure modes I do not, and I would rather have the uncomfortable conversation in week one than defend a decision in month six.
The measure of a system is not how it looks in a file. It is whether other people use it correctly when nobody is watching — which makes documentation, naming and handover part of the design work rather than an afterthought.
The label is the short answer
I put “product designer” on things because it is the shortest true answer, not because it is a boundary. What the job actually is, is moving a business forward — design is the tool I reach for most, but code, a marketing decision or an argument with a stakeholder are all fair game. Understanding how a business and a brand really work is where most of the creativity goes: the difficult part is rarely making something good-looking, it is finding the thing that will work.
A room in Stara Zagora
Outside the capital it is easy to be the only designer you know. You solve everything alone, you calibrate against nobody, and you slowly convince yourself that whatever you do is normal. So I run a meetup for people who make things and want to talk about it.
The board game
Somewhere along the way I started designing a board game, and discovered it is the same job: a small set of primitives, rules that have to hold when you are not in the room, and playtesters who find every ambiguity you left in.
Away from the screen
Games and music take up most of the room left over. I play co-op almost exclusively — the argument about what to do next is half the fun — and I keep a running note of albums that marked a particular stretch of time.
How a thing actually gets made
People are curious often enough about how I approach a product — where I start, what happens long before Figma opens, how an idea turns into something people actually use — that it seemed worth writing down properly instead of answering it badly over coffee each time.
Logos, and the love of them
Branding is the part of the craft I keep coming back to. A fair number of marks have come out of the years — for clients, for employers, for people who needed one thing to stand for the whole of it — and they are collected in one place.
Getting in touch
A message does not have to be a project. If something here is useful, or wrong, or you just want to compare notes on a problem, LinkedIn is the place — it is where I keep up with work conversations, and I answer there.
