I’m a designer, founder and creative strategist. I run smalltribe, a studio for brands and products, and tribehouse, a creative house in Leipzig.
These months I design the cell experience at Sunrise.
I keep it to few teams, so each one gets my full attention.
A house, not an office. A focused workspace in Leipzig-Plagwitz with eight fixed desks, and the whole house for workshops, dinners and talks.
I took it from bare shell to open door: the concept, the interior, the identity, the website and the small tools that run it day to day.
In 2024 smalltribe was still in the old office on Könneritzstraße. We were looking for something bigger, with more possibilities. And with the idea of not just renting an office, but making a place, for us and for others.
In November 2024 a house in the courtyard of Karl-Heine-Straße became available. Still a bare shell, but the direction was clear right away. The first talks with the owner went well, the moodboards and materials convinced. Two or three weeks later the lease was signed.
The whole house lived on one big board first. Both floor plans, notes, sketches, references and the first allocation of the floors. That is where every floor got its job: eight desks, the kitchen and a Meeting Room downstairs. The loft, the net and a Focus Room upstairs. The terrace on the roof.
Then every room got its own board. Kitchen fronts and countertop, light, posters for the walls, furniture for the terrace, the electrical plan.
Every piece of furniture went onto a list in Notion, with price and status.
During construction we were already tenants and on site all the time. The interior took shape in parallel: conceived and designed by us, realized with friends, smow and Studio Boehnke & Haasch from Leipzig.
From February to April 2025 the house was furnished: tables, sofa, Focus Room, Meeting Room, the net, the roof terrace. In March we moved in.
Three levels, 180 m². The ground floor holds eight fixed desks in two islands, the kitchen with a table for six and a Meeting Room with a round table. Upstairs a 47 m² loft with sofa and armchairs, a net over the void and the Focus Room. On the roof a 42 m² terrace with a wooden deck.
Every chair, table and corner is meant to support focused work: Eiermann tables on castors, timber beams, natural tones. Color comes from the posters and the blue sofa.
The mark is TH.S. Cut away the T, the dot and the S, and the H turns into the front of the house, a flat body with a door, drawn in the real proportions of the building. Everything else stays quiet: ink on paper, three pastels taken from the membership cards, interiors in natural tones.
The website says what the house is, then gives the facts that were missing before: the three floors as a floor plan, who works here, what a desk costs, the event formats, the next dates and a journal. In German and English, without a cookie banner, without tracking.
I designed and built it with Claude: Next.js on Vercel, the first directions explored in Figma. Around it, one repo holds the brand system and the small tools: tokens synced to Figma, the newsletter template, share images, and recipes for social posts and print.
The idea is older than the studio. I was seventeen when I first wanted it: a way to work with like-minded people, without the big agency fuss. I always loved the idea of a small studio. Partly as a place, which I have now with tribehouse. But mostly as a collective of creative professionals, a small tribe of good people doing great work. Hence the name.
Today smalltribe is two things. One is the community, a Slack group that grew out of the collective and is still alive and active.
The other is the studio. It started in 2022 as a collective of freelancers and grew into a studio with a team of employees. Since June 2026 it's my own design practice again, a branding and digital design studio in Leipzig working with a circle of trusted freelancers. Together we work with founders on brands and digital products, from positioning to shipped product. smalltribe.studio
A calm Sonos remote for the menu bar. Sonoir talks to the speakers directly over the local network: no cloud, no account, no app to open. Rooms, groups, volume and whatever is playing sit one shortcut away, and the volume keys on the Mac drive the speakers while music runs.
I built it because the Sonos app takes too long for the two things I do all day: louder, quieter, and which room. Sonoir is SwiftUI on top of plain UPnP, and every motion in it is drawn from the same few curves.
A work diary that writes itself. Verk sits in the menu bar and notices which apps, windows and tabs I work in.
In the evening a local model turns the day into four or five ticked-off lines. Nothing leaves the Mac.
Before it writes, Verk asks how the day went, from sluggish to in the flow, with room for a short note.
A brand guide is a document, not a deck. Manual helps you write one, set it well and send it as a link, to your team and to their agents.
A guide can start from an existing PDF, a website, a Figma file or an image.
Every published guide is also served as a design.md, the brand's tokens and rules in one file for coding agents.
A simple app to preview social media posts in the actual platform UI, before they go out. The post is written on the left and shows up in the feed as it is typed.
The bar at the bottom switches the feed between X, LinkedIn and Instagram, so one post can be checked on each network.
The same bar flips the preview between desktop and phone width.
A minimal Gmail client for people who like shortcuts, search and calm interfaces.
A side quest from March to June 2026, and the full package: idea, name, brand, product and build.
omou is where I started taking agentic coding seriously. Somewhere along the way, designing and building stopped being two steps and became one process. That's how I work on every project now.
Mail is a crowded field and a deeply complex one, so I didn't take omou further as a product. As a way to sharpen how I work, it was worth every week.
Business software for freelancers: time tracking, quotes, invoices and expenses in one place, reduced to what matters.
Run the timer, then pull the tracked hours into an invoice with one click.
Quotes and invoices go out in your own branding, set up in a small layout designer.
Made by freelancers for freelancers, in Leipzig, hosted in Germany. heev.me
Embed with your team a few days per month to set direction, raise the design bar, and coach designers.
From early-stage positioning to product UI, I help teams shape the narrative and the interface around it.
Designing in code with AI: prototypes, agents and tools that go from idea to something people can use, fast.
A sounding board for founders and product leaders on vision, prioritisation, and what "good" looks like.
With recent AI tool explorations - with Claude Code, Figma make etc. - I realized something quite banal. Simple and plain prompting, yet still precise, seems to outplay hyper-optimized pre-prompted approaches.
I have tried to explain my intent and let ChatGPT create "the most optimal prompt." For creative work, such as image generation using Midjourney or Freepik spaces, this approach worked really well. Without taking notes or counting stats, anecdotally, I'd say it's better than just trying it with plain language.
For my more product and software related experiments however, I've find it to be counterproductive. I have tried the same "create the optimal prompt" approach for one experiment with different tools. Claude code, Antigravity + Gemini 3, Framer Workshop and Figma make.
All outcomes were rather mediocre, whereas Framer workshop and Figma make came up with the best results. In this case, "best" might be very subjective. But overall, they understood the idea best, proposed best layouts and didn't try to engineer.
Claude and Antigravity in contrast created small monsters for a simple form / chat idea with some logic. It did work, but it would've needed many iterations to get to a satisfying point. It felt like doing way too much and then having to trim off the fat.
I decided to start over again in Claude code. Same version, but a simplified procing logic - I've used a spec for instructions I previously created with the help of Notion Ai, since it had access to our studio related details - and provided claude with an instructions.md.
With that, all I started with was:
"build a super minimalistic chat bot like interface for a proposal estimator. fetch all details from instructions.md. the chat window should look like a modern, minimal, high quality chat interface, similar to chatgpt."
The initial version was already closer to what I've imagined. Far simpler, better ui, nailed the logic and flow.
Why I am writing this has actually less to do with AI and prompting, but with a finding for myself. Overthinking stuff, in maaany cases and situations will not lead to better a better outcome.
It sounds obvious and banal, but as someone who would call myself an introvert with tendencies of a perfectionist, this is something I have to remind myself quite regularly. Which, luckily, has become much better over the last years.
The ability to see, feel, hear and simply know what is good. The ability to distinguish quietly and confidently between what works and what doesn’t. To separate signal from noise. To decide what deserves attention and what deserves to be removed.
As AI accelerates the pace of creation and floods every space with endless options, taste becomes less of a luxury and more of a survival skill. Tools are democratized. Quantity becomes effortless. Quality stays rare.
Design won’t be about pushing pixels or mastering software anymore. It will be about having a strong filter. Clear judgment. The courage to say no. Sensitivity to aesthetics, meaning and timing. The discipline to remove anything that doesn’t serve the idea.
Taste might become the most valuable skill of the future.
Not because it creates more but because it chooses better.
Sonoir, first launch
Sonoir, volume overlay
From Forever to For Never
From Forever to For Never
Mercura
omou
Precision from Orbit
From Forever to For Never
Manual, published guide
Manual, colors
omou command bar
omou reading view
omou triage
Verk
A work diary that writes itself. Verk sits quietly in the menu bar, notices what I work on during the day, and in the evening turns it into four or five lines, like a ticked-off to-do list. Click a line to see the time blocks behind it.
A local model writes the summary. No timers, no account, no cloud: nothing leaves the Mac.
previews.social, Instagram
previews.social, X
Brand Generator
A generative engine for brand assets. One SVG core renders patterns, grain, duotone photos and layouts from a brand's own tokens; each identity is a thin config on top, so a new client gets a working asset tool on day one.
Seeded randomness keeps every variant reproducible, a contact sheet shows dozens at once, and everything exports straight to the formats a team actually uses.
Manual
A brand guide is a document, not a deck. Manual helps you write one, set it well and send it as a link, to your team and to their agents. A guide can start from an existing PDF, a website, a Figma file or an image.
Visit usemanual.siteomou.app
A minimal Gmail client for people who like shortcuts, search, and calm interfaces.
Open omou.appmøn – An audiovisual AI experiment
I have always been inspired by the music of Ólafur Arnalds, Nils Frahm, Max Richter, and other neoclassical artists.
I remember listening to Ólafur and Max Richter probably 18 years ago. Their music touches me deeply, almost allowing me to dive into other worlds.
Today, I was wondering if I could somehow get my hands on "making" this type of music. No goal, just curiosity—I wondered what a tool like Suno would create if I tried to describe this "world" that I hear and feel.
The result, to me, is completely absurd, without exaggeration. It created a song that in no way sounded synthetic or artificial. I listened to it at least ten times, trying to find something wrong, something that bothered me or failed to move me.
A disclaimer: In no way do I compare this with actually making the real music—the artistic process with all its ups and downs.
But it inspired me to create a fully immersive audiovisual experiment using Anthropic Claude and Google Gemini: an interactive visual experience built around the song.
Take a moment, put on your headphones, and immerse yourself for 3:13 minutes. I'd recommend checking it on desktop.
View experiment
