Van Ngo

I design the structure first.
The screens come after.

I lead design at 834 Labs, where I built the design system behind five products and the multi-role platform that admins, agents and sub-agents all work in. I build a lot of what I design, so the handoff is real.

How I think01

I do not open Figma until the problem makes sense. I start with the permission model, the data architecture, and the user’s mental model of what they are trying to do. On multi-role platforms, navigation is the product, so the structural work has to be solid before the visual work can land.

I am best on problems where the complexity is structural: the same data that has to look completely different depending on who is logged in, or a legacy system where users have built years of workarounds you have to respect while still improving things.

I use AI heavily for research synthesis, prototyping and proof-of-concept builds. I set the concept and the system, AI drafts and builds inside it, and every product call is mine. The Vested case study shows exactly how that split works.

01Structure before visuals

Navigation, permissions and data hierarchy come before the first frame. Get the structure wrong and every screen after it is wrong too.

02Evidence over opinion

Published research, audits of the real system, and the data itself. Every major decision needs a reason that is not “I think.” That is how I push back without making it personal.

03Ship a system, not a screen

One polished screen is a deliverable. The real output is a design system that lets engineers build new features without coming back to design every time.

04Dense is not the same as complicated

Enterprise products carry a lot of data. The job is not to remove it. It is to build patterns so consistent that users move through the complexity without thinking about it.

Where I came from02

Before product, I spent six years at Living Magazine laying out feature spreads, managing print production and building visual systems under real deadline pressure. Print does not iterate. You get it right before it goes to press, or it is wrong in every copy. That builds a different kind of eye.

When I moved into product design, the typography, the layout instincts and the care about spacing all transferred. What changed is what comes before them: research, permission models, data architecture. The print years are why my dashboards look finished. The product years are why they work.

BFA in Graphic Design, The Art Institute of Dallas.

What I am looking for03

A B2B product with real structural depth: multi-role platforms, data-heavy workflows, legacy systems that need rebuilding rather than reskinning. Design systems work is a plus. The domain matters less to me than whether the team takes design seriously early.

I am most useful before the scope is locked. If design only enters after engineering has scoped the work, you are paying for a skin, not a solution. The conversations I care about are the early ones, where the right design question can change what gets built.

I push back when I need to, with something to back it up. When stakeholders kept adding content to a client homepage, I used agent research to show exactly which actions were getting buried and how many clicks it added to contracting. That conversation is easier when the data is doing the talking.

Hiring for a complex B2B product? Let’s talk.
vanngographic@gmail.com
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