# Miš Mlakar > Brand & Product Design Consultant Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/mi I’m a bonkers creative who spent the early years of their career as a poster artist, professional photographer and magazine art director. In the more recent years I’ve become the driving design force behind many San Francisco startups. My skills range from creating fully fledged visual identities, designing and developing websites to designing intuitive desktop and mobile product experiences. In my free time I like to hike up sand dunes, design video games, sip on a cold pint of beer, and make up nicknames involving vegetables for my cat (the most popular being “potato” of course). ## Work Experience ### Design Consultant @ Traackr Jan 2025 – Present ### Creative Director @ Madrona Jan 2025 – Jan 2025 At Madrona, I directed brand and creative initiatives across event branding, marketing and motion. My work included a high-visibility animated 3D billboard featured in Times Square. ### Product Designer @ Anthropic Jan 2025 – Jan 2025 Designed a secure in-house performance review tool, improving clarity and usability across feedback and cycle management. Collaborated cross-functionally to define the MVP, streamline admin workflows, and enhance the reviewer experience. ### Product Design Lead @ Tigris Data Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 | San Francisco Bay Area At Tigris Data, I led design across brand, web, and product, shaping the experience for developers and AI teams. I built an intuitive file management experience, reworked complex AWS-native settings into clear workflows, and developed a design system to drive design consistency in a fast-paced, rapidly evolving product team. ### Creative Director @ Unusual Ventures Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 | San Francisco Bay Area I led brand and creative direction at Unusual Ventures and developed a design foundation that captured the firm’s values and brand voice. I worked hands-on with portfolio companies to shape investor decks, build brand systems, and design web experiences. ### Senior Design Consultant @ Plato Jan 2023 – Jan 2024 ### Founding Designer @ Plato Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Bay Area Plato is a low-code platform for building live internal tools. New software companies are invading traditional fields like fintech, proptech, logistics, and healthcare, and must build vast numbers of internal tools to support operations. Existing solutions are either built for engineers (Retool) or fail to integrate with their company's existing systems (Airtable). Plato lets anyone build tools that integrate with their company's databases and APIs. ### Freelance Designer/Developer @ Unknown Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 Freelance creative director, designer and developer for a variety of U.S. and international clients. ### Founding Designer @ Render Jan 2018 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area Render is an automated cloud provider, that lets you host anything from simple websites to complex application clusters. I joined the company as the founding designer and am responsible for design and the user experience across brand, web & product. In the past, I ran branding workshops, led user interviews, and gathered insights on what makes for the easiest yet seamless developer deployment-launch flow and how to scale that for larger teams. On a day-to-day basis, I design and prototype new interactions, micro interactions, flows and components in order to clearly communicate the work to our dev team. In addition to creating HTML & CSS based components, I collaborate closely with our team from the start of any project by conducting research, helping scope work and contributing in PRs where needed. While growing our team I helped develop an interview process for UX engineers, defined a basic developer/designer collaboration process and facilitated retrospectives, project sync sessions and more. I pay special attention to UX issues that could cause potential dissatisfaction or churn and make sure we prioritize them accordingly. I often also work closely with our Growth team on ways to increase user signups. In line with the company values for focus on user experience I developed a redesign plan, which would smooth out some of the rough edges of our current flows, increase clarity of content, and reorganize elements in a more sensical layout, highlighting main actions and introducing some delightful micro interactions, all the while improving consistency. I for one am very excited about the progress so far and am grateful to have such and incredible dev team to collaborate with. ### Freelance Product Designer @ Wedy App Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area Wedy is a Wedding planning app that allows couples to browse, build and book wedding services, while also providing an advanced project management system for wedding professionals. - As Wedy's first Product Designer I created wireframes, flows and designs for the B2C wedding planning experience as well as the B2B client management experience. - The work was done for both the desktop in-browser application and the IOS app. ### Design Lead @ Traackr Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area Traackr is an Influencer marketing platform for large enterprises and Influencers. During my time at the company I worked on Traackr's advanced Influencer search engine, collaborating with the customer success, data and dev teams in order to create a successful experience that seamlessly merges audience and influence score filters into a finely calibrated list of results. I worked closely with our CXO and helped conduct research, user interviews and user testing while also working with the dev team to fine tune and polish Traackr's Influencer performance analytics tool. I created a design system that included HTML & CSS based component examples including micro interaction and positioning guidelines to help improve dev-design collaboration workflow as well as increase productivity. As a wearer of many hats I also designed and developed Traackr's 2017 website, developed a collection of HTML email templates, produced marketing materials including ebooks & event assets, and even ran a few Photoshop workshops. ### Freelance Ix Designer @ Outdoor Ad Systems, LLC Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco Bay Area OAS provides rentable spaces for advertising on mobile vehicles across the country. The company needed a professional look and feel for their website as well as an easy way for customers to view current inventory and easily book it on the spot. I worked closely with a backend engineer to develop the visual inventory and a simple & fast booking system that can be seamlessly embedded into the OAS website. I conducted client/competitor research, addressed SEO issues, designed the entire website, created custom art and animated visuals, retouched existing photos and developed the frontend. ### Lead Designer @ Accomplice.IO Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco Accomplice was a Social Media Management & Marketing Platform. I came onboard as a Lead Brand & Web Designer, but after a successful few months I was asked to transition to Product as well. During my time at Accomplice I redesigned the brand, developed a new logo, designed and built the official website, designed and developed landing pages & HTML emails, created animated advertisements and motion graphics. While working on product I worked closely with Development, Product Management, Customer Success and a UX/Usability Consultant. I spent time understanding the main problems and tackled them by redesigning the navigation and campaign creation flows, with focus on removing the main pain points. I also hired and managed a team of design interns and collaborated with contract developers in order to make sure the work on the marketing side continued smoothly. ### Contract Designer @ LogicNow Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 LogicNow is an everything in one IT management solutions company. I came onboard as a contract designer to help prepare them for the launch of their then newly rebranded visual identity. I worked closely with the Marketing Director and helped refine their landing pages, static & animated web banners, social media headers, flyers and iconography. I constructed HTML emails and polished their brand photography. ### Art Director @ Zveza ŠKIS Jan 2005 – Jan 2014 | Slovenia Zveza ŠKIS is an umbrella organization of all student clubs in Slovenia. It connects them and represents their interests at the national level. Throughout my student and even later in my professional years I worked under many of its branches as the Minister of Culture, an Official Photographer, a Contract Graphic Designer and the Newspaper & Magazine Art Director. My yearly responsibilities involved event organization & planning, event branding, merchandise design, poster design and event photography. By far one of the most comprehensive projects during my time working for the organization was co-founding and art directing the »SKUP« Magazine. In addition to creating and sustaining the visual identity and layout, the work involved managing writers, illustrators, photographers, journalists, print vendors and reaching out to sponsors. ### Photographer @ Center of Urban Culture Kino Siska Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | Ljubljana, Slovenia Kino Šiška is on one of Ljubljana's biggest cultural centers for organizing musical, theatrical and educational events. I was chosen out of more than 140 candidates to become one of their 5 official photographers. This was my third official event journalist/photographer position and it was by far the most educational one. Apart from having the opportunity to get up close and personal with some of the biggest musical acts that crossed our little part of Europe I was also able to attend many cultural events as well as design & web development workshops offered by the organization. ### Marketing Designer @ Porsche Inter Auto Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 | Ljubljana, Slovenia In 2011 I joined the Marketing team at one of the main Porsche Resellers in Slovenia. As the only designer on the team my job involved doing everything from studying brand guidelines for Porsche, Volkswagen and Audi to developing event exhibitions, web ads & banners, direct mail campaigns, business and customer loyalty cards, gift package designs, promo posters, working with print vendors and more. ## Education ### MSc in Design and Digital Media The University of Edinburgh ### Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Fashion, Graphic Design & Visual Communication University of Ljubljana ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/masamlakar - Website: http://www.masamlakar.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/mi JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/mi/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-05