Side work · Illustration, emoji, podcasts, album art, AI · 2013–2026

Anthology of crafts

Commercial and non-commercial projects I loved making: an emoji pack, the illustrated users from my own case studies, podcast covers, a concept app, an album, and — most recently — two things made with AI rather than about it. Some were paid. Most were not. All of them were the thing I did instead of stopping.

Two made with AI · 2026 Five made by hand · 2013–2022
Essay · UX Collective · 17 June 2026 · illustrations made with Magnific AI

The Digital Kowloon

Written and illustrated · 105 claps, a response and two reposts

Kowloon Walled City grew for forty years with no plan: every stolen power cable strung over the dead one beneath it, every floor bolted to whatever was already there. It functioned. It could not be understood, maintained, or safely extended.

In The Digital Kowloon I argue we are building its software equivalent — that vibe coding is not the frontier but a regression to the arrangement the industry spent thirty years dismantling, where the person who knows how to build is by default the only authority on what gets built. The speed is what makes the regression invisible.

The argument, in seven frames

The old machine-first lens, what it costs, who was added to fix it, and what happens when they are removed again. All seven made with Magnific AI.

01The alley itself, and the allegory the essay rests on — in a city nobody planned, a person needs a machine beside her to find the way through.
02"Abort, Retry, Fail?" — the question DOS asked the user, written from the machine's point of view.
03Every function present, the one that matters invisible — ALM1, ALM2, DST, FM and SNZ all lit across the display, and nowhere on it the time.
04Not gatekeepers, but navigators — five people at a board that is still sparse and legible under its Product Manager heading. Watch that board; it comes back as the last frame.
05A developer and an AI assistant sharing a workstation — the agent's hands on the keys, the developer's in his hoodie pocket.
06Designing at speed — a designer and her agent gripping the same safety bar, finished panels rushing past on one side, ghosted wireframes receding on the other.
07The same room and the same five people as frame 04, each now paired with an agent of their own — and the board behind them, still headed Product Manager, overrun with contradictions and crossed-out notes. Everyone busy, everyone productive, nobody building the same thing. The argument, in two pictures.
Knowing what to build, and why, always was the hard part. AI did not change that. It just made it easier to avoid thinking about it.the essay's closing line
Read it on UX Collective →
Daily podcast · written, researched, voiced and illustrated by AI · pipeline built solo · 2026

This human

Eleven orchestrated Claude-API skills · Season 1, twelve episodes, March 2026 · publishes itself to Spotify and Apple

This human is an attempt to use AI to describe humanity. Each episode takes the human side of one historic figure — someone born on that date — and the whole of it is researched, written, edited and narrated by a machine. What I made is the factory that runs the entire process.

Eleven Claude-API skills run as one orchestrated chain, and I invented the host they all write for: a fictional presenter named Norman Kendrick, with a living biography and a tracker that stops him reusing his own anecdotes.

The artwork is prompted and generated too

The show's own cover sets the spec — black substrate, gold ENIG traces, the components encoding that subject's story — and every episode's artwork is generated against it. Six of the twelve follow; each one is a door into the episode.

the showThe artwork the whole system is drawn against: a dandelion built as a circuit, its seed head a ring of plated via-holes, its stem a single gold trace, two leaves cut clean out of the board. The show →
S01E06Akira Kurosawa — a tanto blade rising from the board's central chip, some sixty gold wires fanning from its hilt like a fallen army, the whole field ruled with vertical traces falling as rain. Listen →
S01E12Octavio Paz — a bronze mask with chip-dies for eyes, wired to an open book. Listen →
S01E02Alexander McQueen — gold shears opened over a field of printed skulls, their pivot screw seated on the board's one processor. Listen →
S01E08Gloria Steinem — her aviators laid out in gold, the left lens ruled shut and struck through, the right opened into an iris of components. Listen →
S01E03Wilfred Owen — a gold poppy with a ring of plated via-holes for its heart, its stem running down into the solder. Listen →
S01E09Leonard Nimoy — the Vulcan salute etched in gold, a Hebrew-marked die in its palm. The salute came from the priestly blessing he watched in synagogue as a boy. Listen →

The factory, stage by stage

runs it allConductordrives every stage below, in order
  1. 01Collectorthe research
  2. 02Story writerthe story, in neutral prose
  3. 03Host writerthe same story in Norman's voice
  4. 04Fact-checkerverifies every claim
  5. 05Editorfixes, then annotates for the voice
  6. 06Voice directorone API call per direction block
  7. 07Moderatorwrites its own content warning, in the host's voice
  8. 08 Sound editornarration, stings, chapters, mastering Cover designerthe cover, against the spec the one parallel stage
  9. 09Publisherships it to Spotify and Apple
Sticker pack · illustration · 2020

Poop Moji

96 characters, all drawn by me · a pack that ended up in other people's conversations

In the summer of 2020 I noticed a common need for an outlet for negative feelings. It reminded me of Russian Mat, where any word can be turned into a curse — so I built the same affordance out of one emoji.

96 characters, all illustrated by me, so you can say "I love you! But as well… poop!"

96 ways to say it without saying it

Pack, then detail, then the construction — and then the only proof that matters, people using it.

01The full pack — 96 characters on one sheet: crying, haloed, money-mouthed, frozen, censored, crowned. One silhouette, the whole emotional range.
02Four at full size — one crying a single blue tear, one flushed and panting, one laughing with hearts, one bright green and past saving. The drawing has to carry an expression at sticker scale, where there is no room for a face.
03Behind the glass — two Illustrator windows, the finished pack behind and Pooperstein Moji 0.4.ai in outline view in front: the same base swirl, re-cut ninety-six times.
04In the wild — the same pack in WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram, in Hebrew conversations that were not mine.
05Sent, not sampled — a real thread, two hours of it, ending on a kiss-blowing poop with two blue ticks. This is what shipping a sticker pack looks like.
Illustration · personas · for the case studies

The users, illustrated

Nine portraits, one drawing system · they appear in the Project Blossom, Project Buttercup and Project Bubbles case studies

I used this portfolio as an excuse to do something I had wanted to do for a long time — illustrate the typical users of the systems I designed.

Drawing a persona well takes a kind of intimacy you only get after living with a user group for a long time: which insignia they wear, how they hold their shoulders, what age they actually are.

You can't draw someone you haven't listened to

The published trios, then the full set, then the construction — so it reads as something built rather than sketched.

01Command and staff — a woman in a light service shirt with a ribbon bar, an officer in black aviators and epaulettes, and a grey-haired civilian in his sixties in a sweater and glasses.
02Aircrew — three men in identical olive flight suits, told apart by rank tabs, squadron patches and a name-tag rather than by expression.
03The squadron floor — a training officer, a technical officer and an operations clerk: the all-day residents of the systems.
04All nine together, three by three — one drawing system stretched across ranks, ages, uniforms and services.
05The construction — every portrait was sketched by hand on paper first, then rebuilt in vector in Adobe Illustrator. This is users.ai in outline view, where the shared armature of paths shows.
Podcast covers · illustration · the Making History network

Making History podcast covers

About a year of episode covers · one image per episode, in a network house style

An interest in podcasting led me to Ran Levi, creator of Making History and chief editor of the Making History network. After we met I illustrated episode covers for about a year — one image per episode, each one carrying a story I had only heard, in a house style that had to survive Freud, the ISS and a chess engine in the same grid.

A year of covers for someone else's stories

The range first, then how one of them was actually made, then a cover for a sibling show on the same network.

01Twelve episodes, four by three — a cochlear implant, two old men boxing, a chess engine on a laptop, magenta cables streaking across the Atlantic, a DNA helix over a starfield, the ISS, a tin-can telephone answered by a smartphone, and >Hello World_. One style, twelve unrelated subjects.
02How each cover was made — roughly sketched in Photoshop, printed on paper, traced with a Rapidograph pen, scanned back in and coloured in Photoshop, sometimes with a vector layer added on top. This is freid large.psd, the bearded man from the boxing cover, open at 98%.
03{עושים תוכנה} — a cover for a sibling show on the same network.
Concept · social podcast creation · self-initiated

Launch

"Podcast Odyssey" · a concept app built on Marshall McLuhan's argument that the tool decides what the medium becomes

Launch is a concept for a social podcast-creation app. A user can write, record, narrate or edit any podcast in the system, not only their own — write a script and then listen to several versions of it performed by different people.

The interface treats an episode as a body with parts to be filled, and the completion percentages as its vital signs.

A podcast you make with strangers

The whole flow: the brand, the creation screen, one show, the sounds it still needs, recording one, and editing the result.

01The mark and the wordmark — a broken orbit of faceted purple, teal and crimson solids trailing dust across a starfield, with Podcast Odyssey under it.
02Create — drifting through space, finding unfinished episodes you can take part in.
03One show — everything already done on it, and everything still left to do.
04The requests — the sounds this episode still needs recorded.
05Recording one — the in-app record interface.
06Edit sound — the episode's edit console.
Album branding & art direction · Extravagantic Things · 2013

NoaBe

Brand and art direction, not illustration · every physical copy shipped with a double-sided poster

I was hired to brand and art-direct the album production for the independent singer NoaBe — Extravagantic Things (2013). I brought in Tel Aviv illustrator Tahel Maor; the three of us developed the concept together, and once each painting existed on paper I scanned and edited it into the album's overall style.

The singer wanted the record to exist physically as well as digitally, so the typography was drawn by hand — traced letter by letter on a lightbox — and every physical copy shipped with a double-sided poster.

Branding a record, down to the tape on the desk

The finished object first, then the poster, then the process nobody has seen, then the album out in the world.

01Front cover — a girl carrying a house as a handbag, a toy train circling her feet, and the title hand-lettered above her.
02Back cover — a sapling growing out of a shipping box with a hooded crow on the rim, and the ten track titles hand-drawn beside it.
03Front and back together — the two paintings read as one argument about home and leaving.
04The double-sided poster — a pink gumball machine with a girl inside it on one face, all ten lyrics on the other.
05Assembly — the cover open in Photoshop: person, train, scan and paper ground held apart as separate layers over a scanned texture.
06The lightbox, 14 October 2013 — for the album's typography and its poster I printed every line of text and every lyric, traced them by hand, then scanned the tracings back in and assembled them into the design. This is where "hand-drawn typography" actually happened.
07The launch show — the back cover's box and crow set inside the front cover's train ring, on the invite for the second single's release gig at Levontin 7 on 5 April.
Illustrations by Tahel Maor. Album written and composed by NoaBe (2013), produced by Joseph E-Shine.
Page · closing

Some other stuff

Seven projects · 2013–2026

Some of it was briefed and some of it wasn't; none of it was the day job, and that is the point. The two newest pieces were made with AI; the five behind them were made by hand, and they are what earns the right to have an opinion about either.

The rest of the portfolio
And elsewhere
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