About

I’m Agustian — a product designer in Bengaluru, by way of Kerala.

I’ve spent about three years being the person who gets asked “hey, can you just make this look good?” and then quietly redesigning the whole thing instead.

None of which was the plan.

It started with cars — and more to the point, TV shows about people building cars. Bitchin’ Rides, Fast N’ Loud, Count’s Kustoms. I wasn’t in it for the engines. I was in it for the twenty minutes where someone sketched a thing that didn’t exist yet and then argued with a client about the stance, the proportions, the exact wrong shade of orange. That looked like a job. I went looking for it.

Which is how I ended up sitting design entrances. 87th rank in UCEED, then IIIT Jabalpur.

And there the thing I came for got quietly replaced by something better. I showed up wanting to make objects look good and got taught to design for the people using them instead. Somewhere in that, I found out the part I actually loved was never the paint. It was the fixing — finding what’s broken, having a go at it, seeing whether it took.

A fairly long detour from car shows to land on that, and I’d take it again.

I find the problem. I fix the problem. I check whether the fix actually fixed it.

That’s it. That’s the whole framework.

The tools change every time — sometimes it’s user interviews and a whiteboard, sometimes it’s a prototype in code because nothing else would settle the argument, sometimes it’s sitting with support tickets for a day. Picking the tool is part of the work. Committing to one before you know the problem is how you end up with a beautiful answer to the wrong question.

• Movies and series. I watch a lot, and I take the bad ones as seriously as the good ones — a thing that doesn’t work is usually more instructive than a thing that does.
• Anime. Long-running, unreasonably committed. It’s the one thing I consume purely as a fan, with no professional excuse attached, and I’d like to keep it that way.
• Neymar. Have been since the start and still am, through every transfer, every injury, and every take about wasted potential. Watching him at his best was worth all of it.
• Barcelona. I didn’t find football and then pick a club. I watched Barça play and that’s how football happened to me. Visca Barça.
• RCB. Being an RCB fan used to be a diagnosable condition and is now, briefly, a flex. I intend to enjoy it while it lasts.
• Ferrari. I follow Formula 1 primarily for the strategy calls, which is a bit like following a restaurant for the fire alarm.

Looking for a product team where design isn’t the last stop before engineering — somewhere with real users, real constraints, and other designers to argue with.

If you’re hiring, or you just want to disagree with something I built: