Michal HlavatySenior Creative Designer
Cologne · Germany

Design, from the first idea to the final frame.

From half-built
to ready for review.

Shop journeys, product visuals and campaign film. I bring together structure, design, imagery and 3D to turn an unfinished brief into working prototypes and finished media.

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01

Interface and
front-end.

Complex products. Clearer decisions.
UX and UI explored through working prototypes you can actually use.

Photo CardsOpen the working prototype

Working prototypeDemo basket

01 / Product UX · Prototype

Photo Cards

Given
A live card journey that asks two questions in pop-ups — orientation, then sign in or continue as a guest — before a single design is shown.
Time
Two days for the UX and UI. Three more for the 48 designs — defining the rules for layout, colour, type and elements, and building them into the configurator.
Returned
Designs first. All 48 on the first screen, four formats priced in one row, a colour switch on every tile. Two steps and a review sheet to the basket. Behind it, a test set of 48 Christmas designs, made with AI to rules I defined.

A card journey rebuilt around the product rather than the questions. Orientation becomes a format that can change later; photos, text, colour and a 3D view of the whole card all work in one editor, and the main button always names what is left to do.

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Designs before questions.A working prototype. The basket is a demo; no order is placed.

The Universal ConfiguratorOpen the working prototype

Working prototypePhotobook landing page

02 / Product UX · In development

The Universal
Configurator

Given
The group's biggest project — an in-house replacement for the configurator software the group licenses. Twenty-one sections, front and back end, built continuously by engineering.
Time
Half a day for a smaller section like the mugs, eight hours at most. Two days for a more advanced one — the pet portrait or the advent calendar. Built between other work rather than in one block.
Returned
Twenty-one sections prototyped as working screens, each with live price, live state and a working control, so the flow could be argued over before anything was built.

A new ordering platform for the group's products. I shape the UX and UI, turning complex choices into working screens before engineering builds them. The calendars round collapsed the personal-events flow from five interactions across two modals to one inline form.

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One system, many product journeys.Photobooks, calendars, photo tiles and print options — shown through interactive sections.

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03

AI Pet Portrait

One page and a basket · eight screens come out

 04

Stampa su Tela

Build · Approved

Given
An Italian shop carrying close to twenty years of accumulated design, to be rebuilt on Shopify.
Time
About a week for the four templates, then two more days to deliver all the imagery. One of the earlier projects.
Returned
Four working templates — homepage, category, product and gift finder — built as front-end, not mockups.
Status
Approved; being rebuilt on Shopify for launch.
 05

Photo sur Toile

Build · Prototype

Given
A shop arguing price — the page title read "Photo sur Toile 4€ » Toile Photo −87%". The ticket was scoped as images and content.
Time
Two to three days for twelve pages in two languages.
Returned
Twelve pages in two languages at content depth, its own visual language, AI imagery and film produced for it, and tokens enforced as build failures. The prototype argues the wall rather than the discount.
 06

Universal Product Card

Component · Prototype

Given
Live tiles where a £4.50 canvas and a £26 acrylic looked identical, so customers bought on price.
Time
Four to eight hours.
Returned
A card rebuilt around material-first imagery and a fixed three-slot spec line. Benchmarked against four category leaders, tested for German string lengths, card height cut by a quarter.
 07

Photo Books

Build · UK page published

Given
A category page the UK shop did not have, and a live page mixing product types with paper sizes — seven cards, one orphaned on a row of its own.
Time
Four hours to the live page; the rest of the day for the full image and film set and the German document. Iterated since as the range grew.
Returned
Seven cards became four, organised by binding rather than format. Two market-ready pages, four films, and a price database derived from the configurator so every figure stays live.
 08

merchOne

UX · Proposal

Given
A live B2B print-on-demand shop, analysed cold, with no brief.
Time
An afternoon.
Returned
A full redesign proposal — restructured, same corporate identity, placeholder imagery. Not commissioned.

Full cases open, keeping your place here.

02

AI film.

Characters, worlds and the objects that matter. Campaigns built from a controlled asset set and finished in Premiere Pro. Every campaign film follows the same production schedule: three days for the English cut, then two more for the German version and social ratios. The films and the pages come from the same hand, so the product in the film is the product on the page.

09 / All-Year Spot · Published

A home full of stories.

Given
A brief for a film that could run all year — no season, no offer, for an audience of women roughly 30–45.
Time
Three days for the English film — story, storyboard, character and product sheets, clip and music generation, then assembly in Premiere. Two more for the German version and the 9:16 and 1:1 cuts.
Returned
One locked asset set, four cuts, two markets and two orientations. 1.73M views between them.

An everyday scene, with the products present through the memories they hold. One campaign, two markets.

The case

10 / Summer Vibes · Production study

Summer Vibes

Given
A campaign needing a hero film and a companion film explaining how ordering works.
Time
Three days for the English film, two more for the German version and the social ratios — the same shape as every campaign film.
Returned
One locked asset set, two deliverables. The how-to's photo picker is filled with the hero film's own frames — the system yields a campaign, not a clip.

The production system in full: cast, locations, products and edit decisions held together across a campaign.

The case
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11

Valentine’s

Social cuts published · TVC unreleased

 12

Mother’s Day — The Brand Cut

One asset set, adapted for two markets

 13

Mother’s Day — The Offer Cut

Product handling and the offer · Unreleased

 14

Narrative Films

Five films about distance, memory and presence · Pet memorial: three markets inside nine days

 15

Product Films

Explainers and gallery pieces, built around the object

Full cases open, keeping your place here.

03

Product builds
in 3D.

Product models corrected once to their production data, then reused for every output — adverts, explainers, loops. Built in Blender and finished in After Effects, directed through Claude connected to the whole chain — Blender, the Adobe apps, Adobe Stock, Magnific and ElevenLabs — with titles and animation built by script rather than keyframed by hand. The first pieces are capability tests, made to find out how far the company's own models can carry product film.

16 / Mug adverts · Capability test

Six mugs. Six styles.

Given
The company's existing Blender models of the mug range — wrong in size, texture, colour and surface finish. No brief: a test of how far 3D, AI and animation could carry product film.
Time
Two days, most of it correcting the models and rendering.
Returned
The models corrected against the production specifications, relit, and animated to behave like the real products — the magic mug revealing its photo from the bottom up, the coloured mug shown across its interior colours. A 55-second advert for six mugs, cut once and delivered twice: English in the UK shop's colours, German in a softer palette for meinfoto.de, to test how far the same system can flex.

Titles, opener and logo animation were built by scripts that Claude Code wrote and ran in After Effects.

One cut, two shops.
A capability test, unpublished.

The case

17 / Print areas · Capability test

Where your photo goes.

Given
Four print layouts — portrait, landscape, panorama and full print, the last on the classic mug only — and the question of where each one actually sits on a curved surface.
Time
Two days, on the corrected models.
Returned
Two explainers of the same message, executed two ways, from the corrected mug models. One follows a single mug beside a flat drawing of its wall, unrolled, stepping through each layout. The other puts ceramic, porcelain and enamel side by side and shows each layout on all three at once. Both close on the full range.

One message, two executions.
A capability test, unpublished.

The case
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18

Passepartout

Five layers, five finishes · Capability test

Full cases open, keeping your place here.

04

Campaign and
print craft.

A foundation in layout, editorial and print production. Selected examples of the craft behind the work.

Lidl Christmas 2017 cover with a vegetable wreath on a blue background

19 / Editorial

Lidl Christmas 2017

Seasonal editorial design for Lidl UK. Explore the magazine and the wider layout collection.

Explore editorial
PRINT Magazine article featuring a vintage Movie Night canvas

20 / Photography & print

In PRINT Magazine

Product photography featured in “A Love Letter to Vintage Ads, On Canvas.”

Explore press & print
Red and black Let the Adventure Begin enamel mug design

21 / Product design

Let the adventure begin.

One of 33 enamel mug designs — a playful collection of travel, typography and illustration.

Explore product designs
About / Cologne, Germany

One practice.
From idea to review.

I’m Michal, a Senior Creative Designer working across product UX, AI media and 3D. My practice connects Marketing, Product and Engineering at The Customization Group.

I direct and build working prototypes in Claude Code, produce the imagery and film that go with them, and build the products in 3D that both depend on. That keeps the product consistent across the film, the page and the prototype — and gives engineering a working reference to connect to production.

How I work Read CV

Film

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Interactive prototype

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