Eleven years of shipping production interfaces for teams that would rather hire one senior operator than brief an agency. The work is opinionated, the contracts are small, and the principal writes the code himself.
Chapter I · Origin
The practice began in October 2014, in a one-room apartment in Kita Ward. I had spent the previous four years as a lead designer at a Tokyo-headquartered fintech, where I learned that the most expensive thing in a product organization is not design talent — it is the gap between design talent and the engineer who has to defend the next sprint. Every interface that crossed my desk in those years was a compromise across two heads, two toolchains, and two weeks of translation.
So I left. Not to start a studio — studios become agencies, agencies become account managers, and account managers are how design gets explained rather than shipped. I left to do the work in a single head: read the brief, draw the screens, write the components, push the pull request, and sit in the Slack channel when the on-call engineer has a question at 11pm.
Eleven years later, the shape of the practice is the same. The schedule is not. The first year shipped a single engagement — a 14-week rebuild of an internal analytics tool for a logistics firm. The most recent year shipped 18. The bench has grown from zero to four collaborators (a motion designer, a 3D generalist, a copy lead, a research partner), but the principal is still one person, and every shipped interface still passes through one keyboard.
The practice is not a studio. It is one designer, one inbox, one calendar, and four people on call.
What I look for in a client has not changed since the year the apartment was cold: ambiguous scope, measurable stakes, and a team that would rather move fast on a strong opinion than run a two-month consensus workshop. If that is your situation, the next section will feel familiar.
The practice, in numbers
Cross-checked against the practice's own records and the 73% repeat-engagement rate logged since 2019. No marketing rounding.
Chapter II · The model
The principal is one person. The bench is four, and the four are named only by the role they fill on a given engagement. When a project needs motion, motion is engaged. When it needs 3D, 3D is engaged. When copy or research is the bottleneck, the relevant collaborator picks up the thread — same Slack channel, same design log, same SOW.
No project is staffed from a sales pipeline. No project is run through an account manager. The email you write lands in an inbox read by the person doing the work, and the reply comes from the same address.
Every statement of work includes one measurable UX metric — activation, retention, or task-completion time, chosen with the client at kickoff and instrumented against their existing baseline. If the shipped interface does not move that metric, the final invoice is reduced by 50%.
This is not a clause inserted to look tough in the proposal. It has been triggered twice in eleven years, paid out twice, and has never been renegotiated mid-engagement.
The point of the guarantee is not the refund. The point is that it forces a conversation at the beginning of the engagement about what "good" actually means for your product, in numbers, before a single Figma frame is drawn.
Public work
What the practice publishes is the same kind of thing it ships: unglamorous, in production, and accountable to a real user base.
A headless React and TypeScript component library. Built for designers who would rather ship the component than brief it. Used in production by 600+ teams. 3.1k stars on GitHub. Maintained in the open, with a public changelog and a real issue tracker — not a marketing repo.
View the repositoryA workshop on instrumenting design decisions — turning subjective review cycles into measurable post-launch deltas against a pre-registered baseline.
A talk on the disappearing handoff — what happens to a product team when the same person designs the interface and writes the components that render it.
A session on constraint-driven interface engineering — using a tight design token contract to keep a 6-week engagement shipping against a fixed spec.
If the scope is ambiguous and the stakes are real
Replies within one business day, in the same time zone as your calendar. Three-week minimum on first engagements; longer scopes are quoted after the call.
