About

I am a designer and engineer in Copenhagen. For the last nine years I have worked on the interfaces of small software companies — mostly the parts customers never mention until they break: onboarding, billing, settings, permissions, the screens that decide whether the product feels trustworthy.

Before that I studied architecture for two years and left, which turns out to be the most useful education I have for this work. Buildings taught me that circulation is design, that nobody reads the plan, and that the most important decisions are made before anything is drawn.

How I work

I write before I draw. I build the empty state first and the loaded state second, because the empty state is the one every new person meets. I would rather ship a small thing that is finished than a large thing that is nearly there, and I am fairly stubborn about that.

I do the engineering too. Not because designers must code, but because the distance between a design and a working screen is where most of the real decisions hide, and I would like to be the one making them.

Elsewhere

I write a monthly letter called Fieldnotes, keep a handful of small tools alive, and answer every email that is not about search engine optimisation. If you are working on something quiet and difficult, I would like to hear about it: elias@eliasward.com.