I’m a product designer working on tools for thought. Currently leading design at a small systems company; previously at Linear, Notion, and a research lab that no longer exists.
I care about software that respects attention — interfaces that say less and mean more. Most of my work happens in the space between writing and structure.
Projects
- 2026Ledger — A personal finance app that treats budgeting as journaling.
- 2025Quiet Hours — Focus timer for teams — meetings auto-decline while you're in flow.
- 2025Marginalia — Annotation layer for PDFs that exports straight to plain text.
- 2024Field Notes — Design research repository used by three product teams daily.
- 2024Wayfind — Internal navigation system for a 2,000-screen enterprise app.
- 2023Tonearm — A tiny record-collection tracker. My first shipped side project.
- 2023Common Thread — Community textile archive built with a museum in Rotterdam.
- 2022Type Specimens — An ongoing collection of one-page specimens for overlooked typefaces.
Notes
- 2026·04On defaults — Why the default state of a tool is its real interface.
- 2026·02In praise of slow software — Not slow to respond — slow to change.
- 2025·11Text-first interfaces — Words are the cheapest, most accessible UI primitive we have.
- 2025·08What I learned from paper notebooks — Twelve years of daily notebooks, and what software still gets wrong.
The fastest way to reach me is mara@example.com. I read everything, reply to most, and am always happy to talk about tools, type, or tea.