Konstantin Hinkel

I'm a senior product and brand designer with 10+ years of experience, focused on technically complex fintech and web3 infrastructure products. I work at founding-team level — owning the full design journey from first principles through shipped product — and I'm most effective in environments where design, engineering, and product strategy are tightly coupled.

Most recently I was founding designer at Garden, a Bitcoin interoperability protocol that processed $2B+ in transaction volume. As the sole designer across the entire product surface — swaps, staking, dashboards, transaction explorers, wallets, and brand — I kept interaction clarity and low cognitive load consistent through 3+ years of iteration. I also built a token-based design system with a Figma component library and a Figma-to-Storybook handoff pipeline, achieving near-100% Figma-to-code parity with AI-assisted component generation via Claude Code.

Before that, I was Senior Product & Brand Designer at Ren Protocol, where I led a full brand identity refresh and owned end-to-end product design for a Bitcoin bridge that facilitated approximately $13B in transaction volume.

I care about cognitive load reduction, gestalt-grounded layouts, and progressive disclosure — making genuinely hard things feel obvious. I'm based in northern Finland, work remotely across European timezones, and am open to scheduled office visits in Berlin, London, Amsterdam, or Zurich.