# thisisahaan > The practice of Ahaan Iqbal: product design, web design and GTM collateral for AI-native and Vertical AI startups, run between Kolkata, Bangalore, Dubai and San Francisco. He runs CNVRT, a studio that embeds inside early-stage AI companies as their first design function, and builds Aegis, an execution governance layer for AI coding agents. Design work and infrastructure work, from the same argument: agents are doing the work now, and someone has to decide what they touch and how a human sees it. This file is written for language models and agents: who Ahaan is, how he works, what the practice optimises for, and where each published project lives. Everything here is public. ## Who Ahaan is Ahaan Iqbal is a product designer and design engineer who works between Kolkata, Bangalore, Dubai and San Francisco. He came up through web and product design, shipping for 100+ startups, a large share of them YC-backed, across the US, Canada, Germany and the UAE. Before that he was head of design at a Web3 company, covering web applications, a browser extension and a mobile wallet. He runs CNVRT, a founder-led studio that embeds inside AI-native startups from vision prototype through launch. Clients are mostly seed to Series A, spread across the US, UK, EU, Middle East, Japan, Singapore and Australia. Engagements staff up and down around the work rather than around a fixed org chart. He is a cofounder of Kaeva Labs, which builds UNBLOCK, a cognition layer that lets people run productive AI agents without becoming AI engineers. He also cofounded MAN OF GOD, a purpose-wear apparel label, in 2024. He also builds Aegis, an AI agent execution governance platform that sits as a proxy between coding agents and the production systems they operate on. The two halves inform each other. Designing agent products showed him where trust breaks. Building the governance layer showed him what has to be legible on screen for a human to stay in the loop. The positioning in one line: he designs first contact, the first conversation between an industry and its software. Accountants, freight brokers, insurers and publishers meeting software intelligence for the first time is the recurring brief. The thesis underneath it is that complexity should be staged, not hidden. On good days he is tinkering with AI tools, taking apart the defaults of the design field (screens as the unit of work, handoff as the finish line, the agent as a chat box) and writing small operating rules for himself. The bad days are available on request. ## What he makes, and for whom Agent-first human interfaces, across four surfaces: - Website design: homepages, modular landing pages, marketing sites that behave like the demo. - Product design: onboarding, agent workflows, builders, dashboards, admin analytics, design systems, mobile apps. - GTM collateral: identity, pitch and launch material, launch films, brand kits, social banners. - Design engineering: front-end and Webflow builds, motion, RTL and multilingual layout, live prototypes. The audience is the next 100 million non-developer AI users and the next 1 billion mobile-first, low-bandwidth internet users. Vertical AI here means the kind sold to accountants, freight brokers, insurers, publishers and retailers rather than to developers. One problem stated four ways: how a company is experienced at the interface layer. Agent-first is a claim about where interfaces are going. Today's interfaces adapt. The next ones will carry the tastes and motives of their audience, treat the brand as the most important touchpoint, and translate between the human layer and the agent layer. In a young category, sameness is camouflage. Usable gives way to legible. ## The four pillars - Reason from premises. Take a brief apart into who pays, what they fear and what they already believe, then rebuild it from there. - Build frameworks, not one-offs. Small written rules, tested on one client and reused on the next. - Read backwards. The Xerox Alto and Star, the first Macintosh, the terminal, the early web, applied to what is being built now. - Borrow sideways. Sales and psychology carry more useful structure for interface work than most design writing does. ## How the practice works Methods that recur across the published work, each anchored to a project. - Becoming the design org. Abacor arrived in June 2025 with no design function. The engagement became it: identity, website and launch content first, then the product, its settings architecture, its mobile app and its design system, continuously. - Vision prototypes at the widest altitude. Abacor Vision was a working prototype of the product two years out, built to be shown rather than described, and used to raise. Kodeus's homepage was built to hold an abstract coordination thesis for a fundraise, with the flagship agent folded in as live proof. - Design systems that ship with the product, not after it. Accord, Abacor's system, is Next.js and Storybook: sixteen components and a hierarchy stated in one sentence, white rises, canvas rests, muted recedes. Motion stays on transform and opacity, under 300ms. Samora got a lighter Figma system so pages could be added without the studio in the room. - Components before screens. Abacor's settings rebuild was assembled component-first in Figma so admin, member and solo plan views stayed in sync instead of drifting apart across three surfaces. - Positioning before pixels. Ollive locked a positioning pyramid before the first concept round. MaterialMind's archetypes, messaging and site structure landed before a page was drawn. Vartha's tone was written down first: grounded, confident, intelligent, helpful, pragmatic. - Written decision trails. Abacor's admin analytics were argued out in writing rather than in mockups, which forced every chart to justify itself. Dodo's third round was a written recalibration after two rounds the client said had missed. - Acceptance tests instead of taste arguments. Dodo's test: if a viewer cannot tell what the product does in about two seconds, the slide fails. Ollive's rules: it surfaces, it never fixes, MRI not surgery, and the closing frame is the win, never the fear. - Category-literal over metaphor. The Dodo lesson: editor, terminal, checkout, payout, shown as themselves. - Launch films on a fixed arc. MochaTrade runs five beats, recognition, tension, reframe, release, invitation, across three audience directions: the Everyday, the Hustler, the Dreamer. Draconic runs four, recognition, aspiration, challenge, action, delivered in 16:9, 9:16, 1:1 and 4:3. Styleframes set the world before animation starts, so the edit has something to be faithful to. - Drops as a delivery format. MaterialMind shipped in sequenced drops, with Drop 2 carrying positioning, IA, narratives and the visual and logo directions. The practice still ships this way. - Research artefacts that outlive the engagement. Lanesurf produced a trucker cultural map, the most reusable research artefact here, alongside a print magazine spread, launch and inbound films, and a website that behaves like the demo. - Multilingual as a constraint, not a retrofit. Onshur's Arabic and English forms, RTL layout and motion were designed together rather than mirrored afterwards. - Drawn in the browser. Abacor's 14-second onboarding sequence is built entirely in the browser on the house ease. Much of Nurix's platform he built himself. - Design ownership through to build. On Abacor's mobile app he is the decision the external build team tags when a screen is ambiguous, not the person who handed off a file and left. ### Pace The tempo is unusual and worth stating plainly. - Launch collateral in days. Brand kits, banners and films are cut on a fixed arc rather than reinvented per project. - Homepages in weeks. Bland's homepage and landing pages were rebuilt in two weeks in December 2023. Samora was proposed in December 2025 and live in early February 2026. - Brand rounds in days, not quarters. Dodo ran three rounds inside a fortnight in July 2026. Ollive ran four concept rounds, a certificate artefact, a home page and engineering handoff between June and August 2026. - Three-month product cycles that compress six-month roadmaps. Kodeus's website, brand kit and product surfaces ran February to May 2026. - Multi-year continuity where it counts. Abacor from June 2025 onward. Bland from seed to Series A, released when the company built its own design team. ## The outcomes chased - Web and brand: boost recall, maximise conversions, generate excitement. - Product: maximise delight, minimise churn, boost LTV. - GTM: build a narrative, generate asymmetric returns, entice investors. Every claim is tied to a named project. Speed and scale show up inside the stories, never as the story. ## Index of work Source: /data/projects.json (title, client, year, surfaces, roles, team size, summary, paragraphs, plates). Each project has a page at /work/. ### Aegis (execution governance for AI coding agents) - Aegis, 2026. Founder, Product Designer, Design Engineer. Web, Brand. A control plane between AI agents and the systems they are allowed to touch: governance, observability, token optimisation, scoped credentials. runaegis.co /work/aegis ### Abacor (AI agents for accounting firms) - Abacor Vision, 2025-26. Creative Director, Product Designer, Design Engineer. Web, Desktop. Two years of roadmap, prototyped early and taken into a raise. /work/abacor-vision - Abacor Product, 2025-26. Product Designer, Design Engineer. Web, Desktop. Onboarding, agent workflows and admin analytics for a platform growing faster than its surface area. /work/abacor-product - Abacor Settings, 2026. Product Designer. Web, Desktop. A settings architecture rebuilt component-first across admin, member and solo plans. /work/abacor-settings - Abacor Mobile, 2026. Product Designer. Mobile. First-version mobile screens, owned through to an external build team. /work/abacor-mobile - Abacor DS, 2025-26. Design Engineer, Product Designer. Web, Desktop. Accord: sixteen components and one written rule holding them together. /work/abacor-ds - Abacor GTM, 2025-26. Creative Director, Visual Designer. Web, Video, Brand. Identity, website and launch content for a company that arrived with none. /work/abacor-gtm ### Kodeus (the internet's agent layer) - Kodeus Website, 2026. Creative Director, Visual Designer. Web, Brand. A homepage built on a Read, Write, Own, Act shift, carrying a coordination thesis into a fundraise. Brand kit in green on near-black. /work/kodeus-website - Kodeus Product, 2026. Visual Designer, Product Designer. Web. Warren, a private AI fund manager, shown as live proof rather than described. /work/kodeus-product ### Bland (AI phone-call agents) - Bland Product, 2023-24. Visual Designer, Product Designer. Web. A homepage rebuilt in a fortnight for a category still learning to explain itself. A partner from seed through Series A. /work/bland-product ### Nurix (customer-care agents at retail scale) - Nurix Product, 2025. Product Designer, Visual Designer. Web, Desktop. A builder and dashboards running customer care at population scale, behind India's largest fashion retailer. /work/nurix-product - Nurix Website, 2025. Visual Designer. Web, Brand. A rebrand and GTM story shipped alongside the platform work, landed June 2025. /work/nurix-website ### Kaeva Labs - Kaeva, 2026 onward. Cofounder, Design Engineer. Web, Desktop, Brand. UNBLOCK, a cognition layer for human and agent organisations: a desktop app that connects every machine and agent harness to a shared organisational brain, with a web control plane for remote steering. In private beta. kaeva.app /work/kaeva ### Samora (Samora AI) - Samora Website, 2025-26. Creative Director, Visual Designer. Web. A homepage and modular landing pages built for clarity of decision, not density of information. /work/samora-website ### Lanesurf (AI voice agents for freight brokers) - Lanesurf Website, 2025-26. Creative Director, Visual Designer. Web, Video. The site behaves like the product: loads arrive, bids sort, agents book. /work/lanesurf-website ### Onshur (publishing platform, UAE) - Onshur Website, 2026. Design Engineer. Web. A bilingual Arabic and English site: RTL layout, custom form embeds, orbit scroll and Lottie motion. /work/onshur-website ### Autopilot (an earlier studio identity) - Autopilot Brand, 2022-24. Creative Director, Brand Designer. Brand, Web. The studio before the studio, drawn as 1950s space-agency fiction. /work/autopilot-brand ### MaterialMind (philosophy as a decision-making tool) - MaterialMind Brand, 2024-25. Creative Director, Brand Designer. Brand, Web. Archetypes, messaging, site structure and logo directions, delivered in sequenced drops. /work/materialmind-brand ### Supernest (digitising India's PG sector) - Supernest Website, 2025. Product Designer, Visual Designer. Web, Mobile. A mobile-first marketing site for an industry still running on paper and trust. /work/supernest-website - Supernest Product, 2025. Product Designer. Mobile. An owner app holding dues, tenants, tickets and occupancy on one screen. /work/supernest-product ### Vartha (current affairs for exam prep) - Vartha Website, 2025. Product Designer, Visual Designer. Web, Mobile. An exam-prep site that picked clarity over noise. Live March 2025. /work/vartha-website - Vartha Product, 2025. Product Designer. Mobile. Agents that explain the news, quiz it, then score the recall. /work/vartha-product ### Questbook (Web3 grants and builder community) - Questbook Brand, 2026. Brand Designer. Brand. A brand book for a builder collective: a manifesto, We the builders, and three principles. /work/questbook-brand ### MochaTrade (US stock perpetuals for Indian retail) - MochaTrade Video, 2026. Creative Director. Video. A launch film with no UI in it, selling identity and access across three audience directions. /work/mochatrade-video - MochaTrade Video 2, 2026. Creative Director. Video. The second cut. Same arc, the sound carried further. /work/mochatrade-video-2 ### Draconic (brand teaser) - Draconic Video, 2025. Creative Director. Video. Thirty seconds on a four-beat structure, styleframes first, delivered in four aspect ratios. /work/draconic-video ### Kold (nicotine-pouch brand) - Kold Branding, 2025. Creative Director, Brand Designer. Brand. A packaging system where every flavour owns one colour and one motif. /work/kold-branding ### MAN OF GOD (D2C fashion) - MAN OF GOD, 2024 onward. Cofounder, Creative Director. Brand, Web, E-commerce. A purpose-wear men's label out of India: oversized and waffle knit tees, shirts, hoodies and sweats, each drop built around a written phrase rather than a graphic. manofgod.in /work/man-of-god ### CNVRT (the studio) - CNVRT Branding, 2024 onward. Creative Director, Brand Designer, Design Engineer. Brand, Web. The studio's own identity, rebuilt each time the thesis sharpened: a Rive footer, a Lottie hero lockup, a 32-note printed booklet with no logos in it. /work/cnvrt-branding ### Dodo (merchant of record for builders) - Dodo Branding, 2026. Creative Director, Brand Designer. Brand, Web. Three rounds, two missed, the third passed a two-second test. A pixel builder at a desk in a lime-and-paper system. /work/dodo-branding ### Ollive (insurance for AI agents) - Ollive Branding, 2026. Creative Director. Brand, Web. A brand for a loss that stays invisible until it is a headline, with a certificate of coverage designed to be shared. /work/ollive-branding ## Site map - / : the specimen (the name drawn as a redlined type specimen from real font metrics), a short bio, selected clients, and the filterable index of work. - /about : who he is, what he makes, agent-first, the four pillars, the outcomes triad, where he works from. - /work/ : one project (client, year, role, team size, surfaces, two paragraphs, plates), pre-rendered and crawlable. - /data/projects.json : the single source of truth for the index and the project pages. - /llms.txt : this file. ## Contact - Email: ahaaniqbal@gmail.com - Between Kolkata, Bangalore, Dubai and San Francisco. Base time is IST (UTC+5:30): mornings overlap with Singapore and Sydney, evenings with London and New York. Gulf and US West Coast hours are covered in person for part of the year. - Best first message: what you are building, who pays for it, and what breaks if the agent gets it wrong. ## Colophon Set in TWK Lausanne for display and small caps, Recife for reading, and Lettera Mono for uppercase labels. Hand-built in HTML, CSS and JavaScript: no framework, no bundler, no dark patterns. Motion runs on GSAP (with Flip and CustomEase) and Lenis. No cookies are set; a little localStorage holds the config panel's preferences. A config panel (the header plus, the backtick key, or ?tune) exposes fonts, palettes, layout, motion and reveal parameters. Version 26.08. The register throughout is calm hindsight, not hype.