Hello! I’m Nilesh.

I am a creative product designer.

I like knowing how things work.

10+ years designing enterprise experiences and digital products10+ years designing digital products.

When I’m not designing I draw, make things and fill sketchbooksI draw, make things, and fill sketchbooks.

I share my workspace with an orange .

Curious about
good design?

Pune, India

Case Studies.

Illustration.

I’ve always worked
between design and systems.

I love to design digital products, and I understand the technology that powers them.

About Me.

I’ve always liked making things and figuring out how things work. Design just happens to be where those two interests meet. Mineu mostly helps by sitting on whatever I’m trying to make.

Nilesh laughing while Mineu, an orange kitten, perches on his shoulder

Mineu, an orange tabby kitten in a rainbow crocheted scarf, peeking out beside a floral curtain

Mineu winking, sitting on a suitcase with a green bow around his neck

Nilu.

Nilu is the name I use for the more personal side of the work i.e the sketchbooks, experiments and things I create.

Nilesh is the designer you’ll see on the resume and case studies whereas Nilu is the part that keeps drawing, building odd little trinkets from clay and following curiosity wherever it goes.

Mineu Biralu is always around me, so naturally he has to show up here as well.

Mineu means small in Paite, whereas Biralu means cat in Nepali, which is how he ended up with such a legendary name. Biralu follows me from room to room and usually likes to stay close. He likes wearing his scarf a lot and also loves playing with his feather toy.

I like to think that me and Biralu are very curious by nature.

How I got here.

From early on, I was drawn to both sides of making things i.e how they looked and how they actually worked in real life scenarios. That was what got me curious about what using things actually feels like, and that curiosity is still at the core of it.

It took me from enterprise experience design at Infosys (2014–2020) into product design and UX architecture, then into independent product and finally UX/UI and brand work from 2020. More recently, that has grown to include AI assisted prototyping and implementation. This has then made me more interested in the role of human judgement and what kind of role it plays when we have such high level assistance at our disposal.

Resume (opens résumé PDF in a new tab) shows the full journey.

How I work.

Start with the problem.
Before I draw anything, I want to know what the problem is, who has it and what limits me.
Make something to react to.
A flow or a rough prototype gets better feedback than a description, so I make one early.
Stay near the build.
I like working with the people who build it. I have written parts of a product myself, so I know what is easy and what is not.
Use judgment.
Tools make things faster. Deciding what matters, what to cut and what feels right is still my job.