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Ibrahim Abdulla
Dubai About

About

A product designer
who writes the code.

I'm a product designer who ended up writing a lot of code, and I think that's where the job is going.

Ask for the portfolio CV
Portrait of Ibrahim Abdulla

Now

At Deriv I work in regulated fintech. That work belongs to my employer and isn't published here. If you want the detail, ask me for the portfolio and I'll send it over.

Before Deriv I spent nearly three years at Shopini Logistics, where I did the product management as well as the design: requirements, competitor analysis, prototypes, and the design system that held the internal tools together through an acquisition. Before that, four years leading a three-person UI/UX team at an agency.

I also build my own version of the same argument from scratch, on my own time: a design system with a machine-readable manifest, where an agent is refused by an exit code rather than asked nicely. It isn't on GitHub, because my contract covers work in that area, so it goes in the portfolio with everything else. Ask and you get all of it.

Agency years

Six of the sites from those years, picked for range rather than for being the best of them. Most of them shipped. Several have been redesigned since I left in 2021, so what is live today is somebody else's work and there is no point linking to it.

  • A dark red landing page for The Smash Room, a rage room in Dubai. A wall of neon and concrete behind two people in protective suits swinging a sledgehammer and a bat, with the headline Smash the stress away.

    The Smash Room

    Red neon and condensed caps, shot in the actual rooms.

  • A dark landing page for Tasali, an Arabic film streaming service. A tilted grid of film posters behind the headline Looking for more, with a start your free trial button.

    Tasali

    Dark UI and gold, behind a tilted wall of film posters.

  • A bright landing page for nai iced teas. A gold can beside cut mango and peach over a tea plantation, with three icons reading no added sugar, nothing artificial, real tea leaves.

    nai

    Product first. Cut fruit and a gold can over a tea plantation.

  • A blue and white landing page for Knauf, a building materials manufacturer. A photograph of an office interior beside the headline Smart solutions and services for a better world, with a pale oversized K behind it.

    Knauf

    Corporate blue, with the brand letterform blown up as a watermark.

  • A landing page for Glam's, an Italian makeup brand. A model in a silver jacket against a tan background, with Reveal the glamorous you set in mixed capitals and script over a pale monogram.

    Glam's

    Editorial. Serif and script mixed, split against full-bleed photography.

  • A warm cream landing page for Sunbulah Group, a food producer. A jar of honey and jam cut out against honeycomb on a rounded shape, with the headline Honey and Jam in a serif face and a bilingual Arabic and English nav.

    Sunbulah Group

    Warm cream and serif, product cut-outs on organic shapes.

How I work

I've been building things outside work since 2015. I have a computer programming degree. I work about 80 per cent in AI agents and 20 per cent in Figma, and I start from a spec, not a canvas.

The daily loop is Claude Code and Codex for most of it, Cursor when I want a different shape of help, and Figma through MCP when something needs to exist in a file a stakeholder can open. Reviewing generated UI happens in the browser, because that is where it actually runs.

I think Figma is still the right tool for two things: stakeholder review, and the final pass where a human eye catches what a rule cannot describe. What it is no longer good at is being the source of truth, because the thing that ships is the package, and a file that disagrees with the package is just a second opinion.

Design systems matter more now than they did, and for a different reason. They used to be about consistency. When agents generate UI, the system is the only thing standing between fast and fast-and-off-brand. You don't prompt an AI into respecting your system. You package it.

Outside work

I've mentored on ADPList since August 2024, and I've served on the Awwwards young jury. The design system starter above is the current side project.

Where I've been

  1. 2024 to nowDeriv, Senior Product Designer. Dubai.
  2. 2021 to 2024Shopini Logistics, Senior Product Designer. Acquired by Lyve.
  3. 2017 to 2021GO-Gulf, leading a three-person UI/UX team.
  4. 2015 to 2017Examsummary.

Contact

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