I design products and brands with impact

From central bank payment systems and decentralized finance products to fusion energy branding, I've led and crafted design across deep technical and complex industries that have real impact on people's lives.

Explore
Tarmo Vannas

About

Head of Design / Chief Design Officer with 25+ years of hands-on, craft-first, and strategic end-to-end experience across product, brand, UX/UI, and design leadership. I've built brands, design systems, and digital products from 0 to millions of users. Covering DeFi wallets, DEX platforms, blockchain ecosystems for DAOs, payment systems for central banks, and brand systems for deep-tech ventures. My work spans visual identity, web and mobile UX/UI, marketing collateral, web development, motion, audio, content, PR, and most things adjacent. AI workflows since 2023 across design, research, code, copy, image and video. Working remotely with global teams since 2012. Crypto-native since 2017.

Approach

My work starts always with listening. I want to hear from the founder, the team, the clients / community / users, anyone who knows the problems the best. Then I research and ideate and work with the team. Often the outcome turns out to be quite different from the initial expectations.

I work with deep empathy from all sides. The business side: what are we trying to do, what does success look like? The audience/user side: who is going to use this, what makes them trust and choose us? I'm constantly asking who needs to believe in our product/brand, and what would make them hesitate. Every person has a different threshold for trust and design has to meet them exactly where they are. This means understanding workflows along with cultural context and institutional expectations, and reasons why a single wrong visual or UX choice can break confidence.

Then I bring it all together by creating experiences that match how people really behave, across brand and product, web and mobile, motion and audio, design systems and team operations, content and PR. Wherever design has impact. A founder coming to me for a website can end up with a complete brand system.

Alongside design leadership, I'm hands-on when needed: front-end code, rapid AI-native prototyping to solve complex UX, writing content and copy, crafting animations, producing a launch video, or creating a brand from scratch. I don't think of these as separate jobs. They're all pieces of the same system to me and I have a wide range of experience to pull from to get things done, hands-on or delegated, with the utmost attention to detail and aesthetics throughout.

I build holistic systems that make things possible at scale: multi-brand design architectures, component libraries that work across consumer and enterprise products, and teams that can shift between polished mobile elegance and utilitarian data-dense dashboards.

Testimonials

Koichi Masuda

I really appreciate the professional work Tarmo has provided. We really do get good feedback from it!

Dr. Makoto Takemiya

Design is really important for how users experience software and especially their first impressions are what stick with users about an app or service. At Soramitsu, Tarmo always worked diligently on making sure that we could deliver the best design and experience possible for our users and that we had a unique and easy to understand visual language that our clients could easily recognize.

Andrew O. Wong

Tarmo has a deep understanding of how design can be used to help businesses create value, and how that value can delight customers. I appreciate how he built designs to help remove friction, and how it shaped the way people experienced and felt about our technology. This focus found success in many of our projects. Tarmo constantly innovates and this is something you want in any person on your team.

Andrew O. Wong

CEO & Co-Founder, Fraud Intelligence Limited | COO, Soramitsu

Valentin Spitsyn

Tarmo's leadership style is a powerful blend of vision and empowerment. Tarmo would champion our needs fiercely to secure buy-in and resources, then give us the space to execute. He removed roadblocks without micromanaging, which created an environment where we could do our best work. His broad-scope, high-level guidance always kept us aligned without stifling creativity.

Let's create something that matters

I work with companies navigating complex challenges and startups building from the ground up. Let's talk if that's where you are.