About

It started with a news story about Hollywood actors being photoshopped to look better. I was intrigued enough to go find Photoshop CS4. A cracked unlicensed copy, obviously.

Răzvan Țugui in profile, a silhouette against a white background.

I never really stopped.

We didn’t have internet at home, so I paid by the hour at an internet café to download fonts, brushes, and stock images, then went home and used them until I could afford to go back. Most of what I made was Counter-Strike forum signatures. A few of them were genuinely good.

These days I’m the only designer across two products, which means I own the whole thing: strategy, research, interface, and the design system underneath it. I like it that way.

I sit between design and engineering. I prototype in code, sweat pixel-level detail, and care more about whether something works in someone’s hands than how it looks in a presentation. Lately that’s meant taking a product from a one-line idea to a near-finished thing on my own.

Same obsession as the café days. Better tools.

Now

  • Reading, The Design of Everyday Things
  • Listening, Floating Points, Cascade
  • Learning, Metal shaders

Outside design

  • Photography, Street and everyday, on a small fixed-lens camera
  • Reading, Design history, biographies, the odd novel
  • Music, Electronic and jazz, found on too many apps
  • Based in, Botoșani, Romania
  • A silver rangefinder-style camera on a white table.
    Photography
    Always one in the bag
  • A row of worn paperbacks standing on a shelf.
    Reading
    Slowly, on paper
  • A record spinning on a turntable, in black and white.
    Music
    Why Songmark exists
  • A cobbled street in Bucharest leading to a domed building.
    Romania
    Home, and the long drives