Jason Csizmadi · Principal Product Designer
Software should feel physical.
I've built design systems and visual languages at Credit Karma, Patreon, Zillow, Fitbit, and Cooper. The part I care about most is the half-pixel: the easing curve, and the way a button pushes back when you press it. Right now I'm designing agentic experiences and building Black Box, my own agent, as a native iPhone and Mac app. I also teach designers to build with AI. Taste is a skill.
Things I've shipped
8 projects
Black Box
A private agent for my notes. It runs on a Mac mini at home, answers from my Obsidian vaults, and every change it makes comes with an Undo.
Forrrge
A native Mac app that turns rough icon ideas into polished exports: prompt a batch, compare them, keep the winner.
Pixxxel
Roll traits, lock favorites, reroll the rest. A native Mac playground for clean 1-bit pixel characters.
PlainType
Paste clean text from messy copy. Everything runs locally.
Disco Moose
A design resource library of 400+ vetted tools, books, type, and inspiration.
Squiiish
Poke, stretch, fling. A squishy physics toy with no scores or levels.
sliiime
Mix, stretch, sprinkle, squish. A slime playground for iPhone and iPad.
Riiiff
A music player for kids on Apple Music. You pick what's in it, explicit songs never show up, kids play on their own.
The right tool at the right stage.
I wasted months looking for one tool that does everything. That tool doesn't exist. What works is the right tool at the right stage. Using Cursor for ideation is like writing a screenplay in Excel.
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01
Explore
- Claude
- Obsidian
- Paper
Cheap ideas, lots of them. Volume beats precision here.
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02
Direction
- Figma
- Illustration
- After Effects
Make the feel decidable. One sharp reference beats ten mood boards.
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03
Build
- SwiftUI
- React · Next.js
- Tailwind · TypeScript
Real code, on the hardware it ships on.
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04
Polish
- Motion Design
- Design Tokens
Easing curves, optical alignment, click sounds.
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05
Ship
- Vercel
- GitHub
A live URL is the receipt.
And when the right tool doesn't exist, I build it: Claude Code skills, a DESIGN.md spec for coding agents, the critique tools in the Lab.
Where I've worked
Intuit (Credit Karma)
Principal Product Designer
Senior Staff Product Designer
- Co-leading visual evolution and design system modernization for a financial product serving tens of millions.
- A fixture in the weekly AI + prototyping guild, helping designers get working prototypes onto real hardware.
- Authored Principles for Designing Agentic AI Experiences: 15 principles distilled from 18 months of hands-on agentic design work.
- Hackathon runner-up, 2026, with an AI design-critique tool that took the event's top AI score.
Patreon
Product Designer
- Three roles in one tenure: visual design, then design systems, then UX lead on high-impact features.
- Visual language modernization: evolved the product identity into a more expressive, accessible system with brand and product partners.
- Design systems: translated that direction into tokenized, cross-platform components, working directly with engineers.
- Launched built-in livestreaming. UX strategy and mobile UI for creators going live on-platform: live video, chat moderation, community-to-content transitions.
Zillow Group
Design Manager, Design Systems
- Co-led an 18-person cross-functional team of designers and engineers on Global Patterns & Experiences in Zillow's design system.
- Evolved the visual language, principles, and frameworks with engineering and accessibility involved from the start.
Trulia
Lead Visual Designer
- Managed the Visual Design and Design System team of designers and engineers delivering across web and native.
- Partnered with brand to establish a new product visual language, shipped alongside Trulia's neighborly rebrand and the Neighborhoods editorial launch.
Fitbit
Lead Visual Designer
- Led the visual language and design system for Fitbit Premium, a personalized health platform that was unannounced at the time.
Cooper
Principal Visual Designer
- Led and mentored the visual design team at the studio that wrote the book on interaction design: standards, quality, and growing in-house talent.
- Lead visual designer on client work, including the National Pro Grid League fan experience, a 2015 Interaction Award winner.
- Paired with interaction designers so the visuals carried the intended behavior and emotional goals.
The Agency Years
Sr. Art Director, Cobra Creative
- Design lead for NFL Network, Verizon, Clif Bar, Asics, Cheetos, and Microsoft: cohesive visual languages for new interactive products.
- Ideation, storyboarding, and UI for mobile and web, including the NFL streaming beta.
Interactive Art Director, Bozell
- Lead UX/UI on the College World Series site for four straight years, and built and maintained its CMS.
- Owned projects end to end: research, usability, strategy, creative, production, plus a new corporate brand identity with senior leadership.
Art Director, Eagle River Interactive / AGENCY.COM
- Brand and interaction design at the height of the first web boom: style guides and UI guidelines across cross-functional teams.
Designer, Learn2.com
- Lead illustrator on interactive training tutorials, streaming multimedia when the web shipped on CD-ROM.
Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, Visual Communication
Writing
On X
Say hi
Off screen
- Builds arcade cabinets and mods retro game controllers when not pushing pixels.
- 1,000+ photos on Flickr as dangergraphics, a handle that predates Instagram.
This site
- No framework, no build step. Markup, taste, and Claude Code.
- ⌘K anywhere · D toggles the lights · G then W jumps to work.
- Open the console. There's something in there for you. ⌥⌘I