Open for two projects this spring
I design digital products people actually enjoy using.
Eleven years of product work for teams who care about the parts nobody demos — the empty states, the error copy, the second visit.
Atlas Flynn — Developer/Designer, Lisbon
Selected clients over the past decade
- Northwind
- Harbor
- Meridian Health
- Cobalt
- Relay
- Fieldnotes
- Sundial
- Overtone
I work with small teams on products that people rely on rather than merely enjoy. That usually means doing the research nobody scheduled, redrawing a flow until it stops needing explanation, and staying long enough to see it survive contact with real use.
Before going independent I led design for payments at Harbor and built the team there from two people to nine. I still prefer being in the shared branch to being in the review.
- 11
- Years designing products
- 40+
- Shipped product launches
- 6
- Design systems in production
- 3
- Teams built from scratch
Selected work
A few projects where the brief turned out to be the wrong question, and what happened after we changed it.
Harbor
A payments dashboard for finance teams moving money across eleven currencies — rebuilt around the reconciliation work people were actually doing.
Support tickets about onboarding fell 64%
Meridian
A companion app for people managing a long-term condition, designed around bad days rather than the demo-friendly good ones.
Thirty-day retention nearly doubled
Cobalt
An identity system for a developer tools company that had outgrown the logo its founder drew in a text editor.
One system across docs, product, and print
Fieldnotes
A reading and annotation tool for researchers, built around the argument you are assembling rather than the documents you are storing.
From a file manager to a thinking tool
Recent writing
Occasional notes on interface craft, design systems, and the parts of the work that resist being turned into a process.
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18 March 20266 min read
The interface that explains itself
Tooltips are a tax on a design that did not finish its job. A short argument for spending the explanation budget on the thing itself.
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2 February 20265 min read
Designing for the second visit
Onboarding gets the attention and the budget. The second session is where products are actually won or lost.
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9 December 20257 min read
What a design system owes its users
A system that is easier to fight than to follow will be fought. Notes on adoption, escape hatches, and the myth of coverage.
How I can help
Four shapes of engagement. Most work starts as one and quietly becomes another.
- Product design, end to end
- I join early, learn the domain properly, and stay through to the release notes. Discovery, flows, interface, and the unglamorous states nobody demos.
- Discovery · Interface · Prototyping
- Design systems that survive contact
- A system is only real once a second team ships with it. I build the tokens, the components, and the documentation that stops it drifting six months later.
- Tokens · Components · Documentation
- Rescuing work already in flight
- Sometimes a product is nearly right and stalled. I come in for a short, honest audit and leave a plan the team can actually execute.
- Audit · Roadmap · Handover
- Design partnership for founding teams
- A standing arrangement for companies without a design hire yet. Regular time, real ownership, and a bar that holds while you look for someone permanent.
- Retainer · Strategy · Hiring
What it is like to work together
“Atlas found the problem we had been describing wrong for a year. The redesign shipped in nine weeks and support tickets about onboarding dropped by two thirds.”
“The design system was the first one our engineers actually wanted to use. Two years on it is still the default, which tells you more than any launch metric.”
“We expected screens. We got a much sharper argument about what the product was for, and the screens followed from that.”
“Careful, fast, and completely unprecious about being wrong. Atlas rewrote a flow three times in a week because the research kept saying something inconvenient.”
Before we start
The questions that come up in almost every first call.
How do projects usually start?
With a call and then a short paid discovery — usually a week. I would rather find out early that the problem is different from the brief, and you get a written plan out of it either way.
Do you work with engineers directly?
Always. I write and review front-end code, and I would rather pair on a tricky state than hand over a static file and hope. Most of my best work happened in a shared branch.
What does a typical engagement cost?
Project work starts around €12,000 and is quoted as a fixed scope after discovery. Ongoing partnerships are billed monthly. No hourly billing — it rewards the wrong things.
Can you take on a redesign of something live?
Yes, and it is most of what I do. Redesigns are mostly archaeology: understanding why the current thing is the way it is before changing any of it.
How far ahead are you booked?
Usually four to six weeks. Short audits can often start sooner — worth asking even if the timing looks tight.
Tell me what you are building.
If you have a product that is nearly right and stuck, or a blank page and a deadline, I would like to hear about it. A first call is thirty minutes and costs nothing.
Open for two projects this spring