Ilse Renko — About
Visual concept preview of the Portfolio Solo template's About page: The maker’s background, how she thinks about the craft, and the small bench of independents behind her. The sections below are a non-interactive composition of open-registry blocks.
I am Ilse. I design interfaces and write the code that runs them, from one room in Tallinn with a window I mostly ignore. Five years in-house, seven on my own, no plans to hire.
I start with the words. Before a typeface is chosen, I want one written sentence that says what this screen is for and what it refuses to do. If nobody will sign that sentence, the design problem is not a design problem yet.
The rest is craft and patience: a type scale you can count on, states drawn for the bad days as well as the good ones, and code plain enough that the next person does not quietly rewrite it.
Working alone is not the same as working in isolation. Every Thursday I sit down with two other independents — a developer in Porto and a writer in Leeds — and we take each other’s work apart before a client ever sees it.
Ilse brings work to Thursday that she already knows is wrong somewhere, and she wants to be told where. Most people bring work they want praised.
Rafa Quintela, independent design lead
Twelve years, condensed. I have never had employees, never taken investment, and never billed a client for a meeting about a meeting.
I turn down more work than I take. It is the only way one person can promise a date and mean it.
Every project ends on a named day. A deadline is a design constraint, not an administrative detail.
If I cannot write down why a thing looks like that, I do not understand it yet. So I write it down.
- 2014 first product job — a bank in Riga
- 2019 went out on my own, one client, no plan
- 29 projects since, one at a time
- 68 notes published instead of posting
When a project genuinely needs a second pair of hands, I bring in one of these six rather than pretending one person can do everything. They invoice you directly and I do not take a cut — I would rather keep the recommendation clean.
I answer my own email, usually the same day. There is a form if you prefer one, but a plain message is honestly fine.