Umut Durgut, black and white portrait

About

I design B2B products, their brands, and the systems that keep both consistent.

I trained as an architect at METU and spent my first years in design on brand identities for cafés, studios and startups. Architecture taught me to start with structure: how people move through a space and what holds it up. I still start a product that way, from its structure and from the words on the screen.

From 2023 to 2026 I was the founding designer at two startups: solarVis, where I designed Sales Engine for solar installers, and DSALTA, a compliance platform. At both I did the research, designed the B2B platform end to end and built its design system, then made the brand, the website and every brand application from that same system.

Today I'm a product designer at Vizio AI. We repositioned the company under three studios, and I designed everything that came with it. To run client projects, I built BuildOS, the AI-first design system our agents use to design and build them.

Today
Product Designer, Vizio AI
Earlier
DSALTA (2025), solarVis (2023), KNTLGY (2022)
Trained As
B.Arch, METU
01

How I work

These are the steps I take on any project, from a brand to a B2B platform.

  1. Start with the structure

    Before any screen, I map who uses the product, what they need to get done and how the parts connect.

  2. Find out before deciding

    I talk to the people who will use it, read what already exists and write down what nobody knows yet, with a name next to each open question.

  3. Write the words first

    I write the real content for every state, including empty, loading and error, before I draw the layout. More often than not, the words decide it.

  4. Design for reuse

    I make tokens, components and written rules that the next screen and the next person can reuse. The product and its brand come out of that one system.

  5. Make it real early

    I prototype in the real medium, often in code, so we test each decision where it will live.

  6. Check every screen

    I check on a phone first, measure the result, and test it with a keyboard and a screen reader against the rules the team agreed on.

02

Experience

  1. Vizio AI

    Product Designer

    Feb 2026 to present · Ankara

    • Built end-to-end, AI-first design systems with agents and plugins. BuildOS, the one Vizio AI designs and builds client products from, has 10+ themes, multiplatform UX laws, a PRD-to-UX pipeline and a marketing and growth kit for every project.
    • Repositioned the company under three studios with the team and designed all of it as one brand system, Renaissance, across Vizio.ai, stationery, templates and the design system the company's AI tools use.
    • Designed client products on BuildOS, from the PRD to launch.
  2. DSALTA

    Product Designer

    Feb 2025 to Feb 2026 · San Francisco, remote

    • Founding designer of a compliance and vendor-risk platform, from user research to the design system.
    • Built the brand and the marketing website, and designed the whitepapers, reports, decks and social content around them.
  3. solarVis

    Product Designer

    Sep 2023 to Sep 2024 · Ankara

    • Founding designer of Sales Engine, a web app for solar installers covering CRM, inventory, team workload and 3D rooftop design. Preparing a proposal went from one or two days to 10 to 15 minutes.
    • Refreshed the solarVis brand and designed the website and its lead-generation flow.
  4. KNTLGY Studio and Knitology

    Demand Generation Artist

    Mar 2022 to Sep 2023 · Istanbul

    • Led brand, campaign and social work for the studio's client brands.
    • Designed KNTLGY's own parametric prints, NFTs and digital work, and its marketing campaigns and photoshoots.
  5. Freelance

    2021 to present

    • Designed multiplatform products from scratch for Toyota, Waves-on-Chain, Cüzdan Cepte and FootBond, and redesigned Lidyana and Mintgrams.
    • Designed e-commerce sites, apps and Shopify stores for the clients of be4startup, an agency.
    • Designed more than ten brand identities, and the identity of Ancient Futures, an exhibition by xtopia and Meta.
Full Resume
03

Education

Middle East Technical University (METU), Bachelor of Architecture, 2017 to 2022.

Internships at Aboutblank Architecture & Urban Design (2020) and A Tasarım Mimarlık (2019).

At Aboutblank I was part of the team that won national first prize for a Kadıköy masterplan.

04

Skills and Tools

Skills

  • Product design
  • Design systems
  • UX research
  • Information architecture
  • Wireframing
  • Rapid prototyping
  • Web design
  • Brand identity
  • Graphic design
  • Design for AI-built products

Tools

  • Figma
  • Framer
  • Webflow
  • Claude Code
  • Claude Design
  • Codex
  • Higgsfield
  • Adobe Illustrator
  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Adobe InDesign
  • Adobe After Effects
  • Adobe Premiere Pro