Ilse Renko — Designer and developer
Visual concept preview of the Portfolio Solo template's Home page: States who the maker is in one line, shows the practice and a few projects, and offers one honest way in. The sections below are a non-interactive composition of open-registry blocks.
Solo practice · Tallinn
I am a designer who writes the code, or a developer who draws the screens — it depends who is asking. I work with four or five teams a year, one project at a time, from the first sketch to the last deploy.
- 01One project at a time
- 02I answer my own email
- Interface design
- Design systems
- TypeScript
- React
- Payload
- Typography
- Accessibility
- Postgres
- Prototyping
There is no team behind me. That means nothing gets lost between the design and the build, nobody junior quietly inherits your project, and there is exactly one person to hold responsible.
Screens, states, and the empty ones nobody remembers to draw until launch week.
Tokens, components, and documentation short enough that a team actually keeps it.
TypeScript and React, written to be read by someone else six months from now.
Hierarchy, measure, and words that fit the box they were given. Usually fewer words.
Three from the last seven years. Each one designed and built by me, alongside one or two people on the client side who knew their domain far better than I did.
A freight-forwarding console that had grown to three hundred near-identical screens. I spent fourteen weeks reducing it to nineteen components and a set of rules the in-house team still follows.
A small foundry with beautiful type and a website that hid it. New specimen pages, a trial flow that works on a phone, and a licensing step that stopped losing people halfway through.
Forty years of glacier measurements, previously a folder of spreadsheets. Now a public explorer that a journalist on a deadline can read without calling a scientist first.
I keep a plain-text log of every project since I went out on my own. These are the numbers in it — not rounded up, and not counting the ones that died in week two.
One project at a time means there are fewer of them. It also means none of them were handed to somebody else while I was busy with yours.
- years working alone
- 7
- projects shipped since 2019
- 29
- clients who came back
- 11
- median project length
- 9 wks
Working with Ilse is the shortest path I know between a decision and a shipped screen. There is nobody to brief, nothing gets diluted, and she tells you when you are wrong.
Most interface problems are not visual problems. They are somebody upstream failing to decide what matters, and then asking design to hide the indecision. I would rather help make the decision.
Clarity is not a style you apply at the end. It is a series of small refusals, made early, by someone willing to be unpopular for an afternoon.
From “Legible by default”, March 2026
I take four or five projects a year and I am usually booked a month or two out. Tell me what you are making and I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person for it.