Available from August 2026

I build the system, not just the screen.

I'm a UX/UI designer at Damen Shipyards Group. I work on product flows and the design system, and I use AI to cut the slow handoff between a finished design and working front-end code.

Schiedam, NL CMD · The Hague University of Applied Sciences Graduating July 2026
Design systems

WAVE

I led the rebuild of Damen's design system into named tokens for colour, type, spacing and states that map straight to code.

Product design

Real flows

Live product flows taken from user stories and wireframes through to tested, high-fidelity screens.

AI in the workflow

Design to code

My thesis. An AI-assisted workflow the UX team now uses, after benchmarking nine tools and getting Head of UX sign-off.

Selected work

03 projects · Damen Shipyards
Design system Damen

Rebuilding WAVE into a token-based system

WAVE had grown without a clear structure, and the design decisions in Figma did not map cleanly to what developers were building.

Working with two senior designers, I rebuilt it around named tokens. Colour, typography, spacing, radius and iconography, plus interaction states like default, hover and focus, all defined once and readable from code. I also pulled Damen's scattered icons into one labelled library of around a hundred, extending Google's icon set where the platforms needed something custom.

The result is one source that designers and developers read the same way, instead of every team sourcing its own.

Role: Design systems, with two senior designers  ·  Tools: Figma, design tokens
Graduation thesis AI workflow

An AI-assisted design-to-code workflow

Getting an early design in front of the team as working front-end meant a round trip to an external dev agency. Five to ten working days, every iteration.

For my thesis I benchmarked nine AI tools, chose Cursor, and got Head of UX sign-off on the use case. I built and tested the workflow inside the UX team, validated it with stakeholders, and piloted it on a live contact-form prototype that went to the agency for production.

The workflow is now used by the team, and it takes that five to ten day external round out of early iteration.

Role: Researcher and designer  ·  Tools: Cursor, Claude, Figma, GitHub
Product Research

Redesigning MyDamen around how people search

The MyDamen page, and its document search in particular, did not match how daily users actually looked for things.

I ran two rounds of usability testing with around ten participants. The real audience, ship captains, was hard to reach, so I recruited the closest proxies I could: sales staff selling to shipowners abroad, and shipowners visiting in person. Round one showed the document-search filtering did not fit how people search, so I reworked the filtering and its flow into a clearer information architecture and tested it again.

What shipped was shaped by two rounds of testing rather than assumptions about how the page would be used.

Role: UX designer and researcher  ·  Method: Two rounds of usability testing
How I work with AI

I don't use AI to design for me. I use it to take out the slow steps.

The clearest example is my thesis. Getting an early design in front of the team as working front-end used to mean a round trip to an external agency, five to ten working days each time. I looked at nine tools, picked Cursor, and built a workflow the UX team now uses to skip that round in early iteration.

I also keep up with what is coming into this space, because the tools change quickly. A team that knows them moves faster and stays more consistent.

Tools benchmarked
Nine
Tool chosen
Cursor
Approval
Head of UX sign-off
Time removed
5–10 day round
Status
Adopted by the team
About

A bit about me

I'm Akif, a UX/UI designer based in Schiedam, just outside Rotterdam. I'm finishing my Communication and Multimedia Design degree at The Hague University of Applied Sciences in July 2026, and I'm available full time from August.

Most of what I know comes from working at Damen, one of the largest shipbuilding companies in the world. I started there as a student worker and I'm now doing my graduation internship. The work has been a mix of real product design, running a design system, and figuring out where AI actually helps a design team move faster.

I speak Azerbaijani, English, Russian and Turkish. My Dutch is still at a beginner level and I'm working on it.

Focus
UX/UI, design systems, design-to-code
Tools
Figma, FigJam, Framer, Cursor, Claude, GitHub, Photoshop, Illustrator, Notion
Education
BSc Communication & Multimedia Design, UXD specialisation · THUAS, 2023–2026
Certificate
Google AI Essentials
Languages
Azerbaijani (native), English, Russian, Turkish (fluent), Dutch (A2)
Available
Full time from August 2026
Contact

Looking for a junior UX/UI role from August 2026.

Hybrid suits me, and I'm happy to travel across the Randstad by train. If something here fits what your team needs, get in touch.

Email me LinkedIn