Hey,
I'm Ashish.

Taking a problem nobody has framed yet, working out what the people using it and the business behind it actually need, and getting it clear enough that nobody has to think about the interface at all. That is the work I want, and it is the reason a Computer Science degree turned into a design career rather than an engineering one.

I started at HowNow as the founding designer and now lead the team. Before that, four years across healthcare, banking and client work taught me how much of design happens before anyone opens Figma: in the framing, the constraints, and the conversation with whoever has to build it.

A freelance project in my final year of college became the catalyst. It taught me how to work inside constraints, prioritise properly, and ship something real under pressure. My professional career began in 2017, but years of self-directed learning came before it. I said goodbye to freelance in 2019, once I no longer felt a need for it.

I have gone from a self-taught UI enthusiast to leading a design team and the systems it builds on. What keeps me here is what started it: problems worth untangling, and the discipline of turning what you learn into something people can use without being taught how.

Today that discipline runs on two tracks. I design with AI tools like Claude, and I write skills for them: packaged rules that keep a design system consistent at a global level, carry an update everywhere at once, and take the repetitive work off the team so the judgment stays with people. I do not let the tools do my hand work for me, though. Once a week I design a screen from scratch in Figma, by hand, to experiment and keep my own eye sharp. I follow AI and UX trends side by side, because the craft only stays useful if it moves with the tools, and the tools only help if the craft behind them is still mine.

Travel is the part of my life that has changed me most. Switzerland, England, Norway, Italy, Sweden, Singapore, Türkiye, Thailand and Malaysia, and in each one what stayed with me was not the landmark but the ordinary detail: how a city signs its streets, how strangers queue, what a family eats on a Tuesday. Paying attention to that is the same muscle I use at work, and it has made me slower to assume and quicker to ask.

I came back from those trips a steadier version of myself. More patient with people who see a problem differently, more comfortable being the one who does not know yet, and more sure that the best products, like the best places, are the ones that make a stranger feel they belong.

Photography is how I keep hold of it. Formula 1 takes the weekends in between: I have been a Max Verstappen fan since 2016, and in 2026 I finally watched him trackside at Sepang, in Malaysia, the race where he took his first win of the season.