Work with me
I'm Michael Angeles. I design and build products, working in Claude Code. I bring deep UX experience and design craft to engagements, working directly with founders and product teams to turn early ideas into shipped products.
I pass on advisory-only work. If nothing ships, I'm the wrong hire.
- Balsamiq
- Product designer for 15 years.
- Wireframing for Everyone
- Co-author. A Book Apart, 2023.
- Prior work
- Google, Bell Labs, Sapient, and the Met.
- Now shipping
- Unicron, Klarita, and Motivist.
Ways of Working Together
Three shapes, from embedded to a single afternoon. Every one ends with shipped work, not a slide deck.
Fractional design + build
I join your product team part-time and do the job: design the work, then build and ship it. This is what I do for Calx Analytics now.
Ask about the next slot Common questions- Price
- $14,000/mo · two or three days a week, three-month minimum. One slot at a time.
- For
- Product teams that need senior design and shipped code, and aren't ready to hire both.
- What happens
- I embed with your team two or three days a week and take design problems from brief to production. I design the interfaces and write the front-end code that ships them, working in your codebase and your process.
- You leave with
- Shipped product every month, and a design practice your team keeps when I leave.
Team workshop
A hands-on workshop for design teams adopting Claude Code, built from the five courses on this site and run against your product.
Book a workshop Common questions- Price
- $7,500/day · one day for teams up to eight, two days for nine plus. Remote or on-site; travel billed at cost.
- For
- Design teams whose company has said yes to Claude Code and now has to mean it.
- What happens
- Every designer gets a working Claude Code setup, then we work the course material as exercises on your own product, cut from 38 modules to what your team needs. Managers get a session on what to expect and what to measure.
- You leave with
- Every designer shipping from a working setup, shared conventions for briefs and prompts, and the course material to keep going on their own.
Pair session
A working session in Claude Code, on your real project. We make actual progress on it together, and you keep the working habits.
Book a session Common questions- Price
- $1,200 half day (four hours), or $350/hr. Remote, over a shared screen. Most people book the half day.
- For
- Designers who want to ship their own work, and solo founders building without a team.
- What happens
- We meet over a shared screen with Claude Code open on your actual project, pointed at whatever you most want to move. I explain each decision as I make it, from how I brief the model to why I throw a draft away.
- You leave with
- Working code committed to your repo, a CLAUDE.md and workflow set up for your project, and a recording of the session.
What I Work On
The shapes above are how we work together. These are what the work is usually about, and any of them can run through any of the three.
-
Product design and design engineering
Designing the interface and writing the front-end code that ships it. The core of the fractional work.
Questions and answers -
AEO and GEO
Making a site visible and citable to AI answer engines. Assessment, monitoring, and content built to be quoted. Scoped per engagement.
Questions and answers -
Knowledge structuring for AI inference
Vaults, vocabularies, and knowledge graphs an agent can reason over. Library science applied to AI. Scoped per engagement.
Questions and answers -
Wireframing and information architecture
The low-fidelity end of the craft, and the vocabulary work underneath it. Fifteen years at Balsamiq and a book about it.
Questions and answers
I've spent fifteen years doing this job inside a product company.
Balsamiq for fifteen years as the product designer. Co-author of Wireframing for Everyone from A Book Apart. Co-founder of the Information Architecture Institute. Along the way, Google, Calx Analytics, Bell Labs, Sling, Traction, Sapient, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- 5 free courses on this site
- 38 modules, the workshop's source
- 8 products
- designed and built with Claude Code
- Currently fractional at Calx Analytics
- the retainer, running today
Start a conversation.
Tell me what you're building, which of the three shapes fits, 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.