Who is Michael Angeles, and how do you work with him?
Michael Angeles is a UX and product designer in the San Francisco Bay Area. The short version of the background, and what hiring him actually looks like.
Who is Michael Angeles? #
Michael Angeles is a UX and product designer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He spent 15 years as the product designer at Balsamiq, co-wrote Wireframing for Everyone for A Book Apart, and co-founded the Information Architecture Institute. He now partners with founders and product teams to turn early ideas into shipped products, designing and building with AI.
I came up through front-end development, information architecture, and interaction design, back when UX and product design weren’t yet titles anyone put on a requisition. For years I wrote two blogs, iaslash and konigi, about IA and interaction design, and spent most of that time evangelizing early-stage ideation through sketching and wireframing. The bones of that work are still sitting quietly in other people’s deliverables. I like that.
Along the way: Google, Calx Analytics, Bell Labs, Sling Media, Traction, Sapient, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
What is Konigi? #
Konigi is Michael Angeles's design and build studio and personal knowledge hub. It's where he publishes writing and free courses on AI-assisted product design, ships his own products, and takes on a small number of client engagements each year. The name is Esperanto for “to make known.”
The name comes from Esperanto. It means “to make known,” which was about right for what the site was doing at the start: putting out whatever I was figuring out about information architecture and interaction design. It has since become the place everything else accumulates around, through articles, courses, products and resources.
The Konigi wireframe stencils and templates were free and everywhere in the nascent years of web design, and that shape of early-stage ideation carried into what product people later did in Balsamiq. The design teardowns pulled interaction and IA patterns apart piece by piece. The writing shone a light on a field that didn’t have many lights on it yet.
What is Michael Angeles an expert in? #
Product design, UX design, interaction design, information architecture, and AI-assisted development with Claude Code. Michael Angeles publishes his expertise as a structured knowledge bundle at konigi.com/okf, covering eleven areas from design thinking and wireframing to design systems and GEO/AEO. Each one links to the work that proves it.
Job titles answer this badly. That’s why the OKF bundle exists: “what does this person actually know” is something both people and agents keep asking, and a list of former employers is a poor way to answer it. Each concept links down to the writing and courses that prove it, and up to the services that apply it.
What did Michael Angeles do at Balsamiq? #
Michael Angeles was the product designer at Balsamiq for 15 years, working on the wireframing tool used by millions of people to sketch interfaces. The experience became the basis for Wireframing for Everyone, which he co-authored for A Book Apart in 2023.
Designing Balsamiq was a specific education. Your users are your peers. They have strong opinions about craft and they will tell you, at length, when you get it wrong. What fifteen years of that teaches you is the difference between a feature that’s genuinely missing and one that’s somebody’s personal workflow leaking into your roadmap. I had to learn to slow my roll on my own requests too.
What products has Michael Angeles built? #
Eight products, all live: Klarita, a design brief tool; Unicron, a Mac second-brain front end; Motivist, an iOS tracking app for ADHD brains; PatternStax; FLYR.STUDIO; housemusic.is; 80s.is; and The DJ Kit. Most were built with Claude Code as the development partner.
I don’t think of Klarita and the rest as a portfolio, exactly. They’re here so I can show the way I work instead of describing it. Anyone can claim a method works. Eight things you can open and use today is a better argument than any write-up of a process, and a much harder one to fake, because they either work when you download them or they don’t.
What kind of work does Michael Angeles turn down? #
Advisory-only work. Michael Angeles takes engagements that end in shipped product, so if the arrangement is reviewing other people's work or sitting in strategy meetings without building anything, he'll say no. He also holds one fractional slot at a time.
Every Konigi engagement is built around the same thing: the distance between a decision and a live product. Advisory work puts me on the wrong side of that, handing opinions to the people who are actually doing the building and then reading about how it went in somebody’s status update. It isn’t where I’m useful.
If you write and I’m not the right person for it, you’ll get a straight no rather than a slow fade.
How do I contact Michael Angeles about working together? #
Use the contact form at konigi.com/contact. Say what you're building, which of the three shapes fits, what a good outcome looks like, and when you'd want to start. Michael Angeles replies to every note within two business days, including the ones that are a no.
The three Konigi shapes are fractional design and build at $14,000 a month, team workshops at $7,500 a day, and 1:1 pair sessions at $1,200 for a half day. If none of them fit, say so. Tell me what you actually need and we’ll work out whether I’m the right person for it.
Still have a question?
Tell me what you're building, what a good outcome looks like, and when you'd want to start. That's enough for me to reply with a time, or a straight no if I'm not the right person for it.
Reach out to work with meI reply to every note within two business days.