Design services

I design complex products and make them feel simple. For over 15 years I’ve done that for JPMorganChase, Santander, RÚV, Trello, Miðeind, and a long list of startups and open source projects.

My favorite kind of feedback is no feedback. When users don’t complain about an interface, it’s doing its job.

What I design

New products

Taking an idea from a rough sketch to a shipped product. I’ve done it countless times for clients, and three times for myself with Baseline, Prose, and Norde Source.

Redesigns

Your product works, but people struggle with it. Or it’s grown into a pile of features bolted on over the years. I figure out what users actually come for and rebuild around that.

When I redesigned ruv.is, research showed traffic split into three intents with almost no overlap: breaking news, live broadcasts, and catching up on shows. So that’s how the site got built.

AI products

AI is easy to bolt on and hard to make useful. I led the redesign of Miðeind’s AI product suite, and I built Prose, an AI writing app where every AI edit shows up as a change you can accept or reject, instead of your text getting replaced wholesale.

I care about the parts most AI products skip: what happens while it’s thinking, how you review what it did, and how you stay in control.

Design systems

Component libraries and style guides that a small team can actually maintain. I built the front-end framework behind ruv.is and the design system at Miðeind. I’ve also done enough multi-brand work that I built Baseline to make it less of a chore.

Accessibility

Not a checkbox at the end. I’ve designed for credit union members, many of them older, and for RÚV’s national audience of all ages. If your oldest user can’t use it, it isn’t done.

Where I’ve worked

FinTech and banking, journalism and media, AI, health, science, developer tools, open source, and SaaS. Complex domains are where I do my best work.

How I work

Before I open Figma, I want to understand your product, your users, and what you’re trying to achieve. Most bad design comes from skipping that part.

1. Discovery: talking to you and your users, and digging through analytics
2. Design: flows, wireframes, and prototypes, sometimes straight in code
3. Ship: get it in front of real users as soon as possible
4. Improve: test, gather feedback, iterate

Communication is a big part of the job. You’ll always know what I’m working on and why.

I’m based in Iceland and work remotely. I’ve worked with US teams for years, so time zones aren’t a problem.

Let’s talk

Tell me about your project and I’ll get back to you with a proposal within a couple of days.