About

I’m Ivo, a product designer who got here by first trying to build things.

(A note on the name: until 2026 I published and worked as Ivo Vilches De Rosa; I changed it legally to Ivo De Rosa. Same person, same work, and if you searched for the old name, that’s why you’re here.)

Right now I’m a senior product designer at Tucuvi, working remotely from Murcia, Spain, designing the dashboard behind a Class IIb medical AI and the design system it runs on. Before that: embedded finance, a marketing data platform, a fintech, and a design studio of my own.

Before I called myself a designer, I was a founder and a content creator. That early chapter, scraping together a product, talking to users, shipping fast with almost no resources, changed how I approach the work. I never really left that mode.

What I care about most is design that makes something meaningfully better: for the people using it, for the team building it, and for the business sustaining it. I hold those three together even when they pull in different directions, especially when they do.

I’ve been paid to design since 2018, and building products since 2013, across everything from early zero-to-one bets to tools used by thousands of people. Along the way I’ve done a lot of the work that doesn’t fit neatly into a job description: prototyping in code, running research, pushing back on timelines, writing the rationale that gets a proposal through.

I love making lists, that’s why I created a list of products I genuinely like and use. You can check it out on the products page.

How I got here

2014, Co-founded Gamify. Still at university studying film, a YouTuber friend pitched me “a cooler social app.” I dropped out to build it. It didn’t make money, but it’s where I learned data-driven design, biweekly user research, and how a tiny team actually ships (and fails). It’s also where I first built something that worked like a design system: components in InVision, later managed through InVision DSM, a documented palette and type scale, years before I’d have called it a design system.

2017, Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs. After Gamify closed, I spent time at Mensch Creative in Berlin through the Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs program, a placement that gave me a different perspective on how studios work and what I wanted to build next.

2018–2019, Founding designer at Arbor. First designer, and one of the first employees, at a fintech, applying everything I’d learned as a founder. I rebuilt the design-to-development workflow, built the design system from scratch, defined the customer success function with Intercom (now Fin), and worked with marketing on acquisition and CRO: we multiplied landing-page conversion by ten, my first real taste of design moving the P&L.

2019–2024, CommitSans. Co-founded and ran a small studio with Carlos Hernández. Highlights: the Google for Startups Community Directory across seven campuses, an anti-hate-speech game for maldita.es

2020–2022, Teaching, in parallel. I taught the UX master at FICTIZIA and then coordinated it, and later taught at CICE, two years of having to explain design decisions to people who hadn’t made them yet, which is where I learned to articulate it clearly enough that someone else could run with it.

2022–2023, Connectif, alongside the studio. Hired for a single data-viz feature, stayed as fractional design lead, and built the design system that later birthed Brilliant.ai, their AI commerce product.

2024–2025, Toqio. Design Lead on an embedded-finance platform where the products were built by our customers, not just for them: I helped build and extend Nigiri, the design system external partners used to assemble their own financial products. This is where I started designing for builders instead of end users.

2025, now, Tucuvi. Product designer on an AI care-management platform: the practitioner dashboard and a code-first design system (zero Figma) for a Class IIb medical device.

2025, now, NiceCup. A specialty-coffee app I design, build, and distribute alone, because staying close to code keeps my product instincts sharp.

Outside the work

I live in Murcia with my wife, my daughter, three dogs, two cats, and more plants than either of us planned for. The garden has a certain controlled chaos to it that I’ve made my peace with.

I play music, a habit that started long before design and probably taught me more about iteration than anything else. I also have a soft spot for retro gaming: old hardware, old interfaces, and the strange design decisions people made when constraints were brutal and memory was measured in kilobytes.

We are what we consume, but not only food… for example, here’s the last movie I’ve watched: Louis Theroux: The Settlers (2025). I like to play with technology and data, that’s why this line is pulled from my Letterboxd diary when the site builds.