Mikel Garcia — CV

Mikel Garcia

Product Designer & Design Engineer

Berlin, Germany

Founding designer across every company I've joined, owning design foundations, end-to-end product design, and design systems built directly in code, while also driving brand and growth. I turn complex, technical products into simple, expressive interfaces, and ship them. Musician and lifelong tinkerer with creative tools.

Experience

Founding Designer & Head of Marketing

DIA

Sole designer: owned product and brand design end-to-end (app, Oracle Playground, site, sub-brand) and built an AI-ready design system in code.

Business Development

CoachHub

Business development and go-to-market.

Designer & Marketing

BlockState

Sole designer: brand, website, product UI and investor decks.

Design & Marketing (Intern)

AiServe Technologies

Designed brand, website and product UI for an early-stage AI product.

Marketing Analyst (Intern)

DHL Express Spain

First role: marketing analysis and business-development support.

Selected freelance & studio work

Padelko

Designed and built a full production platform (school, tournaments, courts, shop, accounting) with a design system in code. 1,000+ users and 10+ staff run it daily.

Traube

Cofounder. Scaled the design system into code to accelerate agentic coding, and built the web and mobile apps.

Volea

Product design and front-end for a sports-club management platform.

Venesburger

Website for a burger restaurant in the Basque Country.

Uncommon Club

Website for a members' experiences platform.

Education

OTH Regensburg

European Business, Administration & Management

Double diploma (EN / DE).

Cámara Bilbao University Business School

Business Marketing & Management

Skills

Product designUI/UXDesign systemsPrototypingBrandArt directionFigmaAI-assisted buildAbleton LivePremiere ProAfter Effects

Languages Spanish · Basque · English · German

Traube

A community-focused, privacy-first alternative to social media for planning and discovering events. No algorithms, no ads.

Role

Design systems & front-end

Year

2025

Site

traube.club

Traube is a community-focused, privacy-first alternative to social media for planning and discovering events. No algorithms, no ads. I founded the project and led both the design and front-end build.

Traube — meet friends, not screens

Traube — discover and plan events

Scaling the design system

I joined in the summer of 2025. The team had a basic brand in Figma, and I professionalized it, scaling it into a proper design system with real components, variants, empty states and the details that make a product feel finished.

Traube — event feed

Traube — event detail

Traube — community and profiles

Traube — community gathering Traube — people queuing outside a venue

From Figma to code

Toward the end of 2025, as LLM tooling got genuinely good, I got more and more confident shipping directly: PRs, commits, Tailwind, React, APIs, Postgres. I migrated the entire design system and its components into code, and with such a deep library of primitives, building straight in code became fast and reliable. Figma stays in the loop for ideating something entirely new.

Traube — shipped in code

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