https://gongea.com/ Recent content on Andy Gongea — Product Designer Hugo en-us © {year} Andy Gongea Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://gongea.com/blog/velocity-without-risk/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://gongea.com/blog/velocity-without-risk/ <p>A working note, not the finished piece yet: AI tools make an individual faster, but a team&rsquo;s speed depends on people staying in sync with each other, not just with their own tools. This post will look at where that trade-off shows up and how to keep velocity from costing collaboration. Until then, this is a placeholder.</p> https://gongea.com/blog/designing-agentic-ux/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://gongea.com/blog/designing-agentic-ux/ <p>A working note, not the finished piece yet: when an agent is doing part of the work alongside the person, some assumptions in UI design stop holding — who confirms an action, what &ldquo;undo&rdquo; means, how much state needs to be visible versus delegated. This post will work through those questions properly. Until then, this is a placeholder.</p> https://gongea.com/blog/why-i-love-product-design/ Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://gongea.com/blog/why-i-love-product-design/ <p>I wrote a longer reflection on what draws me to product design and posted it on LinkedIn. Read it there:</p> <p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-i-love-being-digital-product-designer-andy-gongea">Why I love being a Digital Product Designer →</a></p> https://gongea.com/work/color-forklift/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://gongea.com/work/color-forklift/ <section class="chapter" id="problem" aria-labelledby="problem-h"> <span class="chapter-head label">01 · The problem</span> <h2 id="problem-h">Even steps in HSL don&#39;t look even to people.</h2> <div class="prose"> <p>A color scale looks simple: pick a base color, then generate lighter and darker steps. Most generators do that in HSL, and HSL isn&rsquo;t perceptually uniform. Yellows wash out, blues turn muddy, and a <code>500</code> in one hue looks heavier than a <code>500</code> in another.</p> https://gongea.com/work/iveeo/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://gongea.com/work/iveeo/ <section class="chapter" id="problem" aria-labelledby="problem-h"> <span class="chapter-head label">01 · The problem</span> <h2 id="problem-h">Recording your screen shouldn&#39;t come with a list of conditions.</h2> <div class="prose"> <p>Recording a quick demo shouldn&rsquo;t require choosing a subscription. Yet every option I looked at charged something: money, features, privacy or an account. I wrote the conditions down and designed the product to remove every one of them.</p> https://gongea.com/projects/koloria/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://gongea.com/projects/koloria/ <p>Koloria was one of my first released design projects: a pixel-perfect icon set built and shared for free, back when hand-aligning every icon to the pixel grid was still the norm.</p> https://gongea.com/projects/neo-charts/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://gongea.com/projects/neo-charts/ <p>Neo Charts started in 2017 as a small jQuery plugin for bar and column charts, and in 2020 I updated it with the version I was using in <a href="https://gongea.com/projects/pagelocity/">Pagelocity</a>. In 2026 I rebuilt it without jQuery and grew it from two chart types to twelve.</p> https://gongea.com/projects/pagelocity/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://gongea.com/projects/pagelocity/ <p>Pagelocity started as a way to learn PHP and JavaScript beyond design tools, by building something real. It&rsquo;s since gone through several rewrites as web performance best practices changed.</p> https://gongea.com/projects/quartz/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://gongea.com/projects/quartz/ <p>Quartz built on what I learned shipping Koloria: a smaller, more focused icon set, launched through Smashing Magazine&rsquo;s exchange.</p> https://gongea.com/resume/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://gongea.com/resume/ <p>I&rsquo;m a product designer based in Craiova, Romania, currently Founding Product Designer at Tenzai. Before that I led design for Snyk Code from the DeepCode acquisition through its growth to $100M+ ARR, working across the web app, VS Code, the CLI and pull requests.</p> https://gongea.com/work/snyk-code/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://gongea.com/work/snyk-code/ <section class="chapter" id="merge" aria-labelledby="merge-h"> <span class="chapter-head label">01 · Launch</span> <h2 id="merge-h">Two cultures, one product, in under five months.</h2> <div class="prose"> <p>DeepCode was a small, research-led startup. Snyk was an established scale-up with its own platform, patterns and customers. Merging the two was hard at times, and it paid off. We had to turn DeepCode&rsquo;s engine into a product that felt native to Snyk, and we had one release window to do it.</p> https://gongea.com/work/update-now/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://gongea.com/work/update-now/ <div class="prose"> <p>Checking for outdated packages usually means leaving the editor: run a command, read a table, then edit version numbers by hand. Update Now puts that information in the manifest itself. A label above each dependency shows whether the update is a <strong>patch</strong>, <strong>minor</strong> or <strong>major</strong> change, so the risk is visible before you click. Clicking applies the update and keeps your <code>^</code> or <code>~</code> prefix.</p> https://gongea.com/experience/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://gongea.com/experience/