Jakub
Krehel

What led you into design?

I’ve been a very visual person for as long as I can remember. My interest in digital design really started when my dad got an iPhone 3G. He let me play around with it and I was instantly hooked and quickly fell down the rabbit hole of jailbreaking and theming.

At first, I spent a lot of time using other people’s themes and quietly lurking in Twitter communities. Eventually, I wanted to try creating my own. I cracked a version of Photoshop and tried to watch every tutorial I could find, though there weren’t many at the time. The icons I made were awful and I had no clue what I was doing but I was having fun and that was all that mattered.

Over time, I somehow found my way into a few small communities on Twitter and Dribbble. People there were surprisingly encouraging and helpful, which gave me the confidence to start sharing my work.

I’ve been doing design ever since. I studied Visual & Experience Design in Berlin, where I got my master's degree, and after that I worked at a few agencies and companies as a Product Designer.

About three years ago, I hit a point where Figma started getting really boring. There’s a lot that happens between a finished Figma design and what's in production. I realized I didn’t just want to design things, I wanted to build them too. That pulled me toward design engineering, which I’ve been obsessed with ever since.

What does a typical day look like?

It really depends on the day. Most mornings are simple, I wake up, brush my teeth, make coffee, and get straight to work.

I'll usually stay locked in for a couple of hours or work for a bit and then head to the gym. I don’t really plan my days, with the exception of meetings and luckily there are very few of those these days. If I need a change of scenery I might head to a local WeWork or a coffee shop.

I work remotely so the line between work and free time is very blurry. I often switch between working on Interfere and personal projects, although Interfere has very much replaced personal projects these days.

As much as I do programming for work, I also do it as a hobby. On weekends, or whenever I have any kind of free time, I usually end up coding anyway.

What's your workstation setup?

I use a Studio Display, M4 MacBook Pro, Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, Magic Trackpad, AirPods Max, Herman Miller Sayl and an Ikea Standing Desk.

Where do you go to get inspired?

An obvious one is X (Twitter). There are a lot of great people sharing interesting work and ideas every day.

I also try to look for inspiration outside of design, especially in other creative fields. I spend a lot of time looking at photography and videography, because it’s something I used to do in the past too. I really enjoy the work of BWGTBLD, a director collective from Berlin.

There’s a lot you can borrow from those mediums, especially when it comes to conveying a feeling through the work, developing a visual language or exploring different styles and aesthetics. In many ways, it’s not that different from design.

What product have you recently seen that made you think this is great design?

In terms of digital products, I recently switched from Apple Notes to Obsidian. I was a bit skeptical at first, mostly because of all the memes about eventually going back to Apple Notes anyway, but Obsidian is a great and very well designed product. The app is fast, nothing gets in your way, and it’s built around plain markdown, so you’re never locked into it.

When it comes to physical products, I really like Rimova. I love how simple and consistent all of their products are. They do one thing but they do it extremely well. I got their aluminum cardholder as a Christmas gift from my girlfriend. I always keep my cardholder in my back pocket, and with leather ones my cards would eventually crack. With this aluminum box, they don’t.

I often come back to the Steve Jobs quote, “Design is how it works”. I tend to think of design as the entire experience, not just the visual layer. When something removes friction, solves a real problem, and quietly fits into your life, that’s great design to me.

What pieces of work are you most proud of?

My personal website. It’s where I share my work, write about things I’m interested in, and document how I build things. It’s become my own corner of the internet and over the past twelve months it’s been visited by more than 150,000 people. It makes me very happy that people enjoy something that I do for fun.

Another project I’m proud of is oklch.fyi. I originally built it for myself while trying to better understand what OKLCH is and how it works. At the time, I was at OpenSea, and we were also looking into migrating our color system to OKLCH to make theming easier.

I started adding new features to help with that process and eventually decided to make it public. I didn’t expect much from it, but it ended up resonating with a lot of people.

What design challenges do you face at your company?

It really depends on the company. In some of the places I worked before, the culture was heavily engineering led, and it could be challenging to communicate the value of great design.

It's maybe more relevant now than before. With AI making it easier than ever to generate code, the differentiator is less about how quickly something can be built and more about what gets built and what the experience is like.

At Interfere, the challenge is very different. We’re a team of four, and everyone has a design background. We don't need to convince anyone that design matters, the challenge is maintaining our high quality bar while moving very quickly.

What music do you listen to while designing?

Any advice for ambitious designers?

Surround yourself with great work. The fastest way to improve is to spend time understanding what makes something good in the first place. Taste develops through exposure.

Be consistent. I like the Japanese concept of Kaizen. Showing up every day and trying to get a little better than you were yesterday. Small improvements compound over time in ways that aren’t obvious day to day.

Build in public. It can be scary at first, and it took me a while to convince myself to do it, but it’s been one of the best things I’ve ever done. Sharing my work online led to conversations I never would have had otherwise. My last three jobs came through X, and that’s also where my first conversations about Interfere started. You never really know who’s paying attention.

Anything you want to promote or plug?

My personal website where I write about design and engineering.

And oklch.fyi, a tool that I mentioned above, that helps understand how the OKLCH color model works.