About

I make interfaces people can feel.

Praise Ofumaduadike

Praise Ofumaduadike

Product DesignerFCT Abuja, NGAvailable

Product designer who learned to code. Now I do both at once — and I wouldn't have it any other way.

FCT Abuja, Nigeria · WAT (GMT+1)

Experience

5+ years design

Currently

Building Starfire

The story

My first design tool was Canva. My first real project was a university club website I built with a free WordPress template and too much confidence. It looked terrible. But I couldn't stop thinking about why it looked terrible — and that obsession never left.

Over the next few years I moved through tools — from Canva to Adobe XD to Figma — and my work got better. But I kept running into the same wall: I could designexactly what something should feel like, but I couldn't always make it feel that way. I was handing off specs and crossing my fingers.

So I learned to code. Not because I had a plan, but because I needed to know what was actually possible. I started with HTML and CSS, moved to React, and never stopped. Something clicked when I realized I could take a design from my own head and build it with my own hands — with real transitions, real states, real data.

Today I think of myself as a design engineer — someone who speaks design fluently but ships production code. I sit at the seam between the two disciplines and I think that seam is where the most interesting work happens.

How I work

Craft first.

Quality isn't the goal — it's the baseline. I sweat the spacing, the curve of an easing function, the weight of a label. The small things are the product.

Systems over screens.

I design components, not pages. A good system scales. A collection of one-off screens just gets messy. I think in tokens, variants, and states.

Motion is meaning.

The way something moves tells you what it is. A tooltip that fades in differently than a modal isn't a bug — it's communication. Animation is part of the design.

Ship, then refine.

The best design is the design that exists. I bias toward shipping and learning over polishing in isolation. Perfection is a draft folder full of almost-done work.

Toolkit

Design
FigmaFramerRiveLottieProtopie
Frontend
ReactNext.jsTypeScriptTailwind CSSFramer Motion
Backend
Node.jsPostgreSQLPrismaSupabaseREST APIs
Workflow
LinearNotionVercelGitVS Code

Experience

Product Designer & Builder

Freelance

2024 — Present

Building Starfire, a GRC compliance dashboard for cybersecurity teams. Also designing this portfolio from scratch and using AI to bring it to life — every component custom-built.

FigmaAI-assisted buildDesign Systems

Product Designer

Freelance

2022 — 2024

UI/UX design for startups across fintech, healthtech, and SaaS. Shipped dashboards, mobile apps, and design systems for clients in Nigeria and internationally.

UI/UXFigmaMobileSaaS

Visual & Brand Designer

Various clients

2020 — 2022

Brand identity, marketing collateral, and digital content. Where the obsession with craft started — caring about kerning before I knew what it was called.

BrandingIdentityPrintDigital

Currently

BuildingStarfire — GRC compliance dashboard for security teams
LearningWebGL, React Three Fiber, and the edges of what CSS can do
ReadingThe Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman
ListeningAmapiano and lo-fi when the code is flowing
Thinking aboutHow AI changes the design-to-code handoff — and if the handoff even needs to exist

Last updated March 2026

Writing

The gap between design and engineering is a feature, not a bug

DesignEngineering
Coming soon

Why I stopped using component libraries and built my own

Design SystemsReact
Coming soon

Motion design isn't decoration — it's communication

AnimationUX
Coming soon