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Senior Staff Product Designer

Jason Csizmadi

Designer who builds.
Los Altos, CA jcsizmadi@gmail.com dangergraphics.com github.com/thecsiz linkedin

Twenty-five years of visual language and design systems at Credit Karma, Patreon, Zillow, Fitbit, and Cooper. I obsess over the details most people ship past: the optical alignment, the easing curve, the half‑pixel. Lately I design agentic AI experiences, build and ship native Mac apps on my own, and teach designers to build with AI. Taste is a skill.

01

Receipts, not promises.

In flight PlainType (private clipboard cleaner) · Argos (native reference library) · Vox (on-device dictation, whisper.cpp) · SpriteForge (node-based VFX engine) · Frontrow (menu-bar meeting alerts). All SwiftUI or native macOS.

02

The ledger.

2011 – ∞
May 2025 → nowOakland, CA

Credit Karma

Senior Staff Product Designer
  • Co-lead visual evolution and design system modernization for a financial product serving tens of millions of people.
  • Built a live, LLM-powered product vision prototype in one week, turning a long-range roadmap into working software senior leaders could hold. The conversation moved from slides to decisions.
  • Authored Principles for Designing Agentic AI Experiences, fifteen principles distilled from eighteen months of hands-on agentic design work.
  • Taught AI prototyping to more than 100 product managers and designers through the weekly AI and prototyping guild, making working software the default way to decide. Click-throughs don't count.
  • Hackathon runner-up, 2026, with an AI design critique tool that took the event's top AI score.
Sep 2022 → Apr 2025SF Bay Area

Patreon

Product Designer
Three roles in one tenure: visual design, then design systems, then UX lead.
  • Helped define Patreon's 2023 rebrand into a more expressive, accessible, emotionally resonant visual language. The rebrand won the Branding category at Fast Company's Innovation by Design Awards, 2024.
  • Translated that direction into tokenized, cross-platform components used across web and native, for a platform serving 250,000+ creators who have earned over $3.5 billion.
  • Launched built-in livestreaming to creators in 2025. Owned UX strategy and mobile UI: scheduled streams, live chat and moderation, access controls, recordings, and the transitions between community and content.
Feb 2020 → Oct 2022SF Bay Area

Zillow Group

Design Manager, Design Systems
  • Co-led an 18-person cross-functional team of designers and engineers on global patterns and experiences in Constellation, the design system behind the most visited real estate platform in the US.
  • Evolved the visual language, principles, and frameworks with engineering and accessibility as first-class priorities.
  • Drove Zillow's rebrand into the live product. Ran pair design programs, motion design education, and future-facing concept work.
Aug 2017 → Feb 2020San Francisco

Trulia

Lead Visual Designer
  • Managed the Visual Design and Design System team of designers and engineers across web and native, setting creative direction through Trulia's rebrand.
  • Helped launch Trulia Neighborhoods, a first-of-its-kind editorial product that debuted nationally with 300+ neighborhoods and grew past 1,100 within the year.
Jun 2016 → Aug 2017SF Bay Area

Fitbit

Lead Visual Designer
  • Led the visual language and design system for the personalized health platform that became Fitbit Premium, which launched in 2019 to a base of 27 million+ active users. The challenge was making dense personal health data feel clear and motivating.
Dec 2011 → Jun 2016SF Bay Area

Cooper

Principal Visual Designer
  • Led and mentored the visual design team at the studio that wrote the book on interaction design: standards, quality, and growing talent in-house.
  • Lead visual designer on the National Pro Grid League fan experience, recognized at the 2015 Interaction Awards, and on Kurbo, a family health product later acquired by WW (Weight Watchers).
03

The agency years.

1996 – 2011
04

The right tool at the right stage.

Design
Visual designProduct design Design systemsArt direction Motion designDesign tokens Interaction designAccessibility Design strategyService design
Build
SwiftUISwift Core GraphicsReact Next.jsTypeScript TailwindLLM APIs Agentic AI patternsCoded prototyping
Tools
FigmaXcode After EffectsClaude Code VercelGitHub Obsidian
05

Notes from the field.

Writing
Recognition
Fast Company Innovation by Design Awards, Branding category winner, 2024, for the Patreon rebrand. Interaction Awards, 2015, National Pro Grid League fan experience at Cooper. Runner-up and top AI score, design and technology hackathon, 2026.
Education
Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, Visual Communication.
Hand-built. No framework, no build step. Jason Csizmadi · Los Altos, California